Top New Tableau Pulse Feature Releases to Know

Enhanced Insights: Seasonality

Tableau Pulse now more accurately reflects the expected range of metrics and recognizes unusual changes for data with seasonality trends.

Enhanced Ask: Related metrics

(Premium capability)
Answer questions extending beyond what Pulse insights previously detected—in particular, asking about another metric from the same metric definition.

Users can now ask questions down to the filter level to navigate to more accurate metric views  with ‘Ask’. Other enhancements include: better case handling for varying levels of answer confidence, global metric search as an additional fallback, and more informative visual treatments.

These enhancements not only enable dimensional drilldowns on entity-level insights, but also use cases that involve changing the time granularity of a metric, applying multiple filters at once in a question, and navigating to parallel metric scopes.

 

Manually created goals

(Premium capability)
Set a manual goal for a given metric. For those with goal creation permissions: select ‘set goal’ in the ellipsis drop down in the web Insight Exploration page and add any relevant edit restrictions.

Dynamic sorting and grouping

(Premium capability)
Sort and arrange your metrics leveraging metadata such as metric name, data source, and time range. This feature allows you to organize and evaluate related metrics together. Detect important patterns and trends in your data with a flexible and user-friendly method for organizing and grouping metrics.

Sort the ‘following’ tab on web by:

• Data Source Name
• Metric Name
• Recency (Recently Followed)

And set that default view consistent across:

• Email Digests
• Tableau Mobile app
• Following tab in the web

Note: Support for Slack digests will be coming in a future release.

 

Popular metrics

Pulse helps you discover metrics more easily by exposing metric follower count in the insight exploration page and metric search. Metric follower count will be shown automatically, without any admin or user configuration.

Set Tableau Pulse as mobile start page

For frequent users of the Tableau mobile app, set Pulse as your default start page for easier, faster access to Pulse.

To configure, update the Tableau mobile app. The app will automatically prompt start page selection upon first access and redirect you to your mobile app settings. In cases where one is connected to Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud with Pulse disabled, selecting Pulse will fallback to default (default set by admin or user on web).

Change mobile time period

Pulse on Tableau Mobile now better matches web functionality around the most common Pulse interactions. Select the ‘filter’ dropdown to change the time period for a metric when browsing your metrics on mobile—without needing to switch to the web to explore.

“Check your Pulse” mobile reminders

Never miss important insights with daily mobile reminders. Enable notifications for the Tableau mobile app to remind you to "Check your Pulse" daily—so you always stay up-to-date with your business metrics.

Personalized insights ranking

Get insights ranked according to what you find most useful through thumbs up and thumbs down feedback. Feedback informs insight ranking for the user that provided the feedback and other users following the same metric. It is considered in the context of metric, filtered population, and insight type. 

Pulse Q&A

Pulse Q&A unlocks more ways to explore your insights through guided questions and the ability to ask questions. Tableau Pulse can automate the most frequently asked business questions on the metric definition context, such as drivers, contributors, trends, and changes. Pulse performs these analyses then delivers them in the form of plain language insights shared in guided conversations via point-and-click (guided questions) or through typing in questions (“ask”). 

“Ask”: You will now see an additional "Ask" button next to the existing guided questions which enables you to ask questions related to metrics you are investigating. Using the "ask" feature will prompt suggested questions that match the insights you are investigating.
 

Guided questions: Analysts and admins can also hardcode guided questions to address the most frequently asked questions about a given metric. In one click, users can self-serve the answer alongside other common questions, speeding up time to insight and reducing repetitive work.

Sparklines in Slack Digest

Receive natural language insights accompanied by visual explanations, making it easier to assess the changes in your metrics in your flow of work. Quickly identify the trend in your metrics and if it’s within the expected range so you can make appropriate and timely decisions—without leaving Slack.

 

Pulse metrics in dashboards

Tableau dashboard creators can now embed Pulse metrics using a built-in dashboard object available in both Desktop and Server dashboard authoring. By embedding Pulse metrics in operational, strategic, and performance dashboards, users can click on a metric to navigate to its detail page, delving deeper into metric trends and readable insights.

Drag and drop the new Pulse Metric dashboard object on your dashboard, and the object will automatically detect all published data sources and their Metric Definitions. 

Restrict metric definition editing

Improve governance by restricting editing or deletion of metric definitions to site admins and authorized analysts. With these updated permissions, metrics are safeguarded from changes by unauthorized users.

Streamlined metric discovery

Streamline metric selection—only main metrics and variations with followers are displayed when searching and browsing metrics.

Time handling enhancements

Date offset: Improve time handling with specified date offsets. Set a date in the metric definition to specify how the system determines ‘today’. This allows users to line up metrics to when the data source refreshes—eliminating inaccurate gaps for non-standard calendars or when data doesn't update daily.

 

Minimum granularity and week start day: Specify a minimum time granularity in metric definitions and set a custom week start day—so you only see relevant time periods that match your data source.
 

Metric bootstrapping enhancements

Discover metrics hidden in dashboard vizzes with smarter heuristics and more context using Tableau Data Guide. Enhancements include improved heuristics to identify primary measures and dimensions in key Tableau viz types (bar, area, and line charts), recognition and inclusion of calculated fields within Published Data Source (PDS), and improved visualization of icons for measures and dimensions.

Want to try out the latest features? Check out the Tableau Pulse release notes.