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What’s New in the November ReleasesTableau Desktop v3.5 + Tableau Server v1.5


Packaged Workbooks help you easily share your work with others

Updated Visual Styles instantly create visually effective graphics

Field Labels provide context and clarity to the displayed data

Legend Highlighting allows a quick, focused study on individual data series

Dashboard Layout improvements make for a better experience creating dashboards

Presentation Mode lets you focus on your data and analysis findings

Server UI Refinements help you browse for content more naturally

Improved Performance in both the desktop and server products

New in November


Packaged Workbooks

A common use of Tableau Desktop is to connect to file-based data sources such as Excel, Access, or text files for the raw data used in the analysis. A growing number of customers use background images from the local file system (.png, .gif, and .jpg files) for placing data in context (typically geographic). Working with these local file system files is fine for single-user scenarios, but when users want to share their workbooks with others it can be time-consuming and error-prone to remember to include all the additional external files when sharing the Tableau workbook. The new Tableau Packaged Workbook feature makes sharing easier.

The Packaged Workbook file is a new format Tableau workbooks may be saved as. When saving as a Packaged Workbook, Tableau Desktop automatically collects all referenced external files (Excel, Access, text, and image files) and packages them together into a single .TWBX file. This packaged file can then be easily shared with others users via email, a shared file system, or by Publishing to the Tableau Server. When the recipient or the Tableau Server opens the packaged workbook, all the data content and background images it requires are accessible within.

Save individual files as part of the Tableau Packaged Workbook

Tableau Server

email

This single file is easy to email, share, or publish to the Tableau Server


Updated Visual Styles

The default settings for the various visual style elements have been updated. The goals of these new default styles are (i) to more deeply embrace best practices for graphic display of information and (ii) to improve the visual impression of the graphics when exported to the web, PowerPoint, PDF, or an Office document. The intention is to create visually effective graphics without the need for the user to perform formatting tasks in most cases. Elements being updated include the default fonts & font colors, row & column labels and headers, divider lines presence and style, text band shading, and axis tick mark and label treatments.

Pre 3.5 default style Pre 3.5 default style

New default style


Field Labels in Table Headings

Tableau now supports including field labels in the headings of tables. For example, a column containing the values “East”, “West”, and “South” may now have a header which indicates this is the “Customer Region”. This addition provides more context and clarity to the information displayed in the table, especially when the workbook is shared using Tableau Server where the viewers do not see the structure of the visualization.


Legend Highlighting

When working with a number of elements in a graphic having a quick way to identify a particular item and have it draw prominently to distinguish it from the others on the page is a useful technique in analysis and presentation. The Legend Highlighting feature does just that – provides an quick way to select an item in the legend of the display and have the corresponding line, bar, or other mark come to the forefront with a unique highlighting to allow a focused study on the item.


Dashboard Filter and Legend Layout

The default layout logic for adding filters and legends to dashboards has been improved to make better use of the screen space. In prior versions, adding filters and legends to the dashboard would divide the drawing region into equal sized vertical areas for these elements to be added into. For legends or filters with few items, this would often result in unused space between the elements. The new layout logic now optimizes the individual sizes of the layout and filter regions to make better use of the vertical space, which generally results in a better experience when filters or legends have more than a few items.

The three columns of filter & legend layouts to the left demonstrate the new logic.

The left-most column is the default layout from releases prior to 3.5, where the layout simply divides the region into equal sized parts.

The center column is the new default where the layout accounts for the varying size of the controls.

The right-most column demonstrates manually resizing the top filter to show the affinity of the bottom three to the bar chart on the bottom of the page, with proper sizing within the available area.

Pre 3.5 3.5


Presentation Mode

Presentation mode is a new option in Tableau Desktop designed to help with interactive sharing of the Tableau workbook. Presentation mode hides all the interface elements except for the minimal to support an interactive presentation of the data content. Using presentation mode is more flexible than simply exporting a series of images to a presentation software package, in that Presentation mode allows for the interactivity of being able to highlight, focus, hide, set filters, and move between the sheets in the workbook. This provides for a nice technique to deliver compelling and interactive discussions about your data.

When designing your visualization the data window, page, filter, mark

and other cards are available on the screen

Presentation mode brings focus solely to your data


Server UI Refinements

Along with general usability refinements, the Tableau Server browse interface listing the content available for a user to work with has been dramatically enhanced to show structure and organization to the contents of the View, Workbook, and Project lists.


Improved Performance

A series of performance optimizations for both the desktop and server products have been implemented. Optimizations include improvements in querying the database when using filters and ad-hoc groups. Performance when working with Tableau Extract files is improved, especially when the extracted data comes from a star schema modeled source. Server customers will notice the performance improvements when browsing for content to view.

Queries with filters and ad-hoc groups will perform better in many scenarios

Extract files now retain the star schema structure and will perform better for many queries

what’s new in the november releases - tableau.com · tableau desktop v3.5 + tableau server v1.5....

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