r/tableau

As a start i want to make a forecasting analysis, well, i don't really know it's good as a starter or should i learn about something else as my first experience?

Besides, where else can i find dataset for my first Tableau project other than Kaggle, i don't really like it as a platform to search datasets except the competitions. Because, i think there are so much cleaned and synthetic also less information we can get from those. Or, change my mind.

Thanks.

Hey everyone,

I recently sat through a demo of the agent rollout in tableau desktop.

I have to say that I’m really not impressed. The agent is just an llm wrapper on your data, which is fine on its own. However, it was shown that it could create a calculated field for the user, which is nice.

I’m arguing that salesforce is missing a massive opportunity to have an actual agent that will assist in the building of dashboards.

When i have a bunch of filters i’d like to apply to a dashboard, it be great to be able to instruct an agent to do that. Additionally controlling the setting of those filters in bulk (customization and application to worksheets).

I genuinely dont see a purpose in a tableau concierge that is supposed to be doing interpretive work for me. I am the interpreter. The AI should be the one cutting out the tedious elements of building in tableau and manually implementing the dozens of tiny features typically done by the tableau dashboard creator.

Unsure what I’m supposed to be seeing about agentforce that is so great. I cant understand why or how this would make creators more productive

I'm using Tableau for dashboards and analysis, and I wish to build a 'gold data' layer for reporting. I'm thinking of learning Tableau Prep to build cleaner datasets for reporting. Do you guys usually use Tableau Prep for ETL?

I have a series of dashboards that I want to show as a workbook, with tabs along the top for each dashboard. I’ve looked at videos for adding navigation buttons, but that seems to require me to add them to each page.
Is there a more automated way to get the tabs to appear? I have four dashboards at present (I will be building more ).

SOLVED

Hey all, I'm looking into the pain points in BI when reporting from messy data. Would love your feedback. What’s the most annoying part of building reports or dashboards for leadership?

Hi All,

Have a twbx on the server that updates daily automatically.

Current urgent business need is to put up an internal website that is an exact replica of the tableau dashboard.

The idea is to get away from tableau atleast for couple of projects to start off.

Currently, I use sql server or hyper extracts to update dashboards daily.

I have tried using Claude code and got a localhost website ready using csv or excel files, have never tried sql or (replacing hyper extracts).

What are the changes that I should be aware of and what would be the next steps for a seamless transition from tableau to local intranet website that updates daily in an automated way?

I own the data and sql tables that drive the current tableau dashboards, no dependent in terms of data.

Thanks for the help in advance.

I am an experienced power bi user, I studied for tableau desktop for 1 week, using a Udemy course that was 7 hours long, then took practice questions on crucial exams, the passed the exam today with an average of 70%. Hope that helps you to pass yours as well!

We are considering a Headless BI approach to ditch the Tableau frontend entirely while keeping the backend data model. Here is our proposed stack:

• Data Layer: Tableau VizQL Data Service (VDS) via HTTP API. This allows us to reuse our existing data sources, complex calculated fields, extracts, and Row-Level Security (RLS).
• State & Fetching: React + TanStack Query for efficient caching and data synchronization.
• UI & Charting: Tremor (Tailwind-based UI library) to build the actual dashboard components and charts natively.

The obvious pros are millisecond-level responsiveness, full design freedom, and clean Git-based version control. However, I’m concerned about the massive jump in development overhead (coding every filter interaction manually) and whether VDS is reliable under high concurrency.

Has anyone successfully deployed a similar architecture? Is this genuinely a faster and better path, or are we just creating a maintenance nightmare for ourselves?

If you have solved the Tableau performance/embed bottleneck, what stack or alternative solutions would you recommend instead?

We are heavy users of Tableau desktop/cloud. We have been able to unlock significant increases in warehouse data modeling speed, that said we’ve struggled to unlock velocity gains by building tableau reports / tableau data layer faster.

Those of you who are really seeing productivity gains on the tableau side what are you doing to unlock it?

Dealing with the calculated fields complexity, workbook design complexity kills us, to the point that team is looking for other tooling to avoid Tableau.

Recently got laid off at my job because I was unable to keep up with the level of tableau requirements that my managers and seniors used now slowly and steadily I will learn and implement everything now.

First I want to know how to connect snowflake or any other database with tableau and how to automate the data refresh there also how does one publish a dashboard to cloud.

linkedIn reminded me yesterday that it's been 9 years since I added owner of an analytics company as a job.

I know a lot of people here are interested in this path, so every so often I try to open myself up to an AMA if anyone wants to know what it's like, how I started, how it's going.

FAQ:

How did you get first client - First client was from Reddit, second from Freelancer, third - ~12th were from Upwork. I was moonlighting early and didn't want to advertise myself too much locally and get in trouble with my FTJ, so relied on online options. Upwork 9 years ago was tough, but way more forgiving than it is now.

How do you get clients now - Prior to this year, leant a lot on content. Building public use dashboards and posting them to LinkedIn, twitter when it didn't suck and relevant subreddits. I also do a lot of open enrollment (paid) training that leads to clients. Referrals and a few in person events rounded out the rest. Online content I find has tanked with the rise of AI, so trying to figure out what my next steps are.

Tips for starting - Have a public portfolio. A good one. One that showcases first your understanding of how to use Tableau and 2 your ability to understand data and data storytelling. Try to make it practical, using open data if possible. My 2nd client onboarded with me because they were a sports facility management company and I had done a viz with my city's facility usage open data. Perfect happenstance, but that will go further than another netflix viz.

Know Tableau but also know SQL to efficiently bring data into Tableau, that's what I wish I knew more of when I started and had to quickly get good at.

What does a day look like - Most of my work these days is backend, facilitating tableau dev for other people (clients or my team). So I spend a lot of time in databases. I spend a lot of time in meetings. I love live building on a call, it's so powerful and useful. I do still work in Tableau but it's a lot less than 3-4 years ago. Also PowerBI has probably surpassed Tableau in terms of client work for me (partly because one of my team members has our 2 - 3 main Tableau contracts).

How do you charge - I charge purely hourly. A lot of "gurus" recommend fixed rate because there is more margin and that's true, but I hate scope management so much that I just do hourly bill. It's seldom been an issue with any clients. I started charging $75/hour which is what my first client recommended, and have just gradually increased it from there.

Best project - One of my favorite projects was a non client project tracking flight delays across Canada that got me onto National news. I had been on local news a few times but this was the highest my content has soared, and it was really cool. Also did a random radio interview for a province 3,000 KM away.

Worst Project - My least favorite projects always comes down to the people. It's can be so hard to balance self respect with needing money - easier as time has gone on. Had a guy that would email his requirements, I'd build them out and publish, he'd not check for 10 days and then get back to me with URGENT. He actually emailed me for a project update Christmas Morning (he was American, yes he knew it was Christmas. Schedule send that shit if you have to) and that was the final straw.

Title might not be very clear, but I'm not sure how else to explain my question. Here's what I need:

https://preview.redd.it/n8oec7lc1g9h1.png?width=260&format=png&auto=webp&s=c017abf3be59300613a748d0d42b8f87e63894a6

I need to reference what a field value is for the instances of that field that correspond to the max of a third field. In the example, I need to know what 'Name' is for each 'Code', but only those 'Names' that correspond to the max 'Year' for that 'Code'. (For each 'Code' and 'Year' combination, there is only and exactly one 'Name' ever.)

Hope that makes sense.

I have messed around for way too long with FIXED {} functions combined with MAX functions, but nothing seems to work. Is there a way to do this?

I searched this sub, but the closest I could find was this thread that isn't exactly what I need - critically, I can't have user filters, etc involved. The '"Latest" Name' field needs to be calculated in the background and referenced throughout the workbook often without user input.

Thanks in advance!

I'm in marketing analytics, producing dashboards for our many clients and the manual rebranding step (colors, fonts, logos) is eating time, curious if anyone has found a repeatable workflow, or if everyone's just doing it manually?

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Whilst there is value to the community when people share content they have created to help others, it can turn this subreddit into a self-promotion spamfest. To balance this value/balance equation, the mods have created a weekly 'self-promotion' thread, where anyone can freely share/promote their Tableau related content, and other members choose to view it.

I'm planning to build a solution to automate Tableau dashboard QC/testing.

We currently have 20+ Tableau dashboards hosted on Tableau Server. The underlying data is refreshed weekly, and every week we manually validate dashboards for:

• Data accuracy and consistency
• Formatting and layout issues
• Filters, parameters, and calculations
• KPI validation
• Overall dashboard functionality

In addition, before promoting dashboards to production, we perform a thorough QC process to ensure everything is client-ready.

The manual validation process is becoming very time-consuming and repetitive. Has anyone implemented an automated testing/QC framework for Tableau dashboards? What tools, approaches, or best practices would you recommend for automating dashboard validation, regression testing, and data quality checks?

I'd love to hear about real-world solutions and lessons learned.

https://preview.redd.it/6u8j2ddl3b9h1.png?width=1326&format=png&auto=webp&s=cca0d7fac152404cac1f098ac39e8591ac963591

Is there a way to slant column headers at a 45 degree angle to make them easier to read? I don't want to take up more horizontal space, and want the column widths to be uniform. A quick search told me there wasn't. Is it possible to fake it by slanted them some other way and then just placing that object on top of the heatmap in the dashboard?