New Features of Tableau that Will Revolutionize Data Analytics

Few developments in the corporate world have generated as much interest as the acquisition of Tableau by Salesforce. Many believed the deal between the provider of user-friendly data analytics solutions and the world’s most popular Customer Relationship Management (CRM) company would revolutionize the way businesses use data, and they were right. The marriage of Tableau’s data visualization prowess with Salesforce’s unrivaled AI and analytics capabilities has paved the way for organizations across the world to leverage their data with levels of efficacy never witnessed before.

Ever since the acquisition, Salesforce has taken various measures to integrate the robust features of Tableau with its AI-powered data analytics solutions, empowering users to make the best use of their business data. Last week, at the Trailblazer DX’22, Salesforce announced Tableau would be equipped with various new capabilities that will allow users with all levels of technical expertise to harness the immense potential of data to achieve business success.

Today, we will examine these newly-added capabilities of Tableau, in detail, and how they help make data analytics accessible to everyone.

Ability to Access Data from Any Online Source, Anytime

Many a time, business users come across various useful data sources on the web but are unable to connect it to Tableau. For example, an online seller of tickets for soccer matches of the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) Champions League may like to connect a data source that indicates the weather conditions in major European cities to determine the likely percentage of tickets that will be sold.

The online seller can utilize Tableau’s Web Data Connector 3.0 to establish a connection to the online source that contains data pertaining to the weather conditions. The seller can access the data through Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) in a hassle-free manner. The web data connector can be used to access data published on any website in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Extensible Markup Language (XML) and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON).

Facility to Use Embedded Analytics Smoothly

Often, companies would like to integrate powerful analytical capabilities into their own applications. Tableau Embedded Analytics enables organizations to seamlessly embed the platform’s immensely powerful analytical capabilities into their data tools to allow their people and clients obtain data-enabled insights in real time.

Companies can enjoy several benefits using Tableau’s embedded analytical capabilities; the capabilities empower their people to run case-specific analyses. For instance, a consumer goods company has released a new detergent into the market, and its team has collected all data pertaining to sales of the detergent across all regions. The team intends to thoroughly analyze the data to identify certain key sales trends for the detergent. Members of the team can use Tableau Embedded Analytics to create interactive dashboards that enable them to identify the sales trends very easily, in no time.

Salesforce has come up with 3 new novel tools that will go a long way in empowering companies leverage Tableau Embedded Analytics with high efficacy viz.:

Embedding Application Programming Interface (API) v3

This novel solution enables organizations to easily embed and integrate Tableau views in web-based applications and webpages. Embedding API v3 is the successor to JavaScript API v2 and comes with significantly enhanced capabilities, which includes a redesigned process to embed Tableau views with minimal effort. The new API will go a long way in delivering better experiences to users and enabling new functionality.

The biggest advantage of the newly-released API is that users can leverage web components to embed Tableau views. Web components can be found in all browsers, and they allow users to add custom-built and third-party functionalities to webpages, using HTML, with little effort.

Embeddable Web Authoring

This brand-new addition to Tableau allows users to bring the data visualization platform’s authoring capabilities into any tool, without hassles. Using Embedded Web Authoring, business executives can now make changes to a data visualization without leaving an app or a web-based portal; they can pose queries and make the best use of data-powered insights in their flow of work.

Using Embeddable Web Authoring, users can carry out simple embedding tasks such as embedding into blogs or their organization’s knowledge repository. However, it should be remembered more complex deployments are executed using Embedding API v3 or the JavaScript API v2.

Connected Apps for Seamless Authentication

This innovative solution from Tableau enables business users to seamlessly integrate Tableau into their own tool very easily; it provides a highly user-friendly framework of authentication (single sign-on), enabling customers of a company to securely use the Tableau platform just by logging into the company’s application.

Organizations can enable hassle-free single sign-on using Connected Apps for Seamless Authentication by establishing a trust relationship between Tableau Server or Tableau Online and their application, using a JSON Web Token (JWT) enabled authentication token. However, it must be noted the organizations must use Tableau 2021.4 (or later).

Trigger Workflows in Salesforce Effortlessly

The dynamic nature of today’s business environment demands companies make the right decisions without delays. Unfortunately, many organizations find it hard to implement sound decisions in time, as a result of time lag in analyzing data, and this negatively impacts their ability to seize opportunities.

This problem can be resolved very effectively using Tableau Actions with Salesforce Flow. The novel solution enables business professionals to trigger a workflow in Salesforce directly from Tableau. This facility goes a long way in allowing users to take actions instantaneously, based on solid data. It puts an end to the challenge of juggling between multiple applications, thereby enhancing decision-making efficiencies considerably.

As you can see, the newly-added features of Tableau help all business users utilize data with high levels of efficaciousness. You can leverage the immense power of Tableau and other Salesforce solutions by teaming up with the right IT company that fully understands your unique business and data needs and has rich experience serving firms in your industry.

Hope you liked this post. How do you use your data? We’d love to know.