Extending Tableau: how our customers are creating their own "apps"

Here at Tableau HQ, we do our best to deliver you amazing functionality, free of bugs. Sometimes customers have use cases and requirements that we don't yet deliver. These may not always be on our roadmap for the future. Fortunately, we have passionate users who create their own apps and extend Tableau functionality themselves. This post examines the kinds of apps that are being created.

What I love about this list is that these tools are possible because of the way we store information in Tableau. Our TWB files are XML format, so if you want to go ahead and build something it's easy. XML is a standard file format and anyone with some programming skills can ahead and create their own "apps".

Do you connect to data in Excel? Is it sometimes badly formatted or in the wrong shape? In which case you need the Tableau Reshaper Add-in for Excel. This tool is going to help you out if your data is not in the correct shape, or you have blank cells that need filling in. If you need more info understanding the best shape for Tableau data, check out this great video by Ross Perez.

Next up is mapping. Tableau's maps are very cool and should satisfy the majority of use cases. But sometimes you really want to use sometime custom geocoded polygons that we don't supply out of the box. You can create polygons using shapefiles, but wouldn't it be nicer to incorporate your custom shapes into Tableau's internals? This is where Richard Leeke, champion of the Tableau Community, stood in with his Filled Map creating tool.

Does your dashboard perform slowly? There are many things you can do to speed up your dashboards. Using Interworks' Tableau Performance Analyzer will help you speed up slow workbooks.

Do you have lots of workbooks? Have you got some huge workbooks with many data connections? Do you need to be able to audit your workbooks in order to work out what data is being used where? If that's the case, the TWB Auditor is for you. You can point this tool at a folder and it will analyse all the workbooks in the folder. You can then view and explore the data in Tableau itself.

Do you find yourself writing long case statements in the calculated field dialog? Alex Kerin created this Case statement generator to speed up the process for you

Moving onto Tableau Server, Interworks, one of our Gold Partners, have produced the Explorer for Tableau Server in case you want a differnet interface for your Tableau Server.

These tools demonstrate the passion of our customers - they acknowledge that Tableau cannot fix every bug or develop every feature, even though we would love to. They show that it's possible to open up our files, or logs, and examine/adapt them to their own needs. I'd like to thank these developers for working on these tools and contributing to our vibrant user community.

Please note that these tools are not covered by Tableau support. You can approach the authors directly, via the Community channels to ask for help.