The three day conference hosted in Las Vegas by Tableau kicked off on the 9th of May. This was the first conference I have ever attended, so I was filled with anticipation and excitement to understand what they encompass.
TC23 is an opportunity for Salesforce to showcase the direction that they are pushing Tableau in. This year’s conference had a very notable theme – AI. In the kick-off keynote – a host of AI-focused enhancements to Tableau were presented- TableauGPT, Tableau Pulse, and Tableau Gestures. For me personally, I found Tableau Pulse to be the most interesting of the three – notably because it would allow users to pluck metrics they wish to track from multiple datasources, and have them on one ‘centralised’ welcome page. In a perfect Tableau Server environment, I can see this becoming a very useful product for those who are only interested in certain metrics that may sit across many dashboards.
Across the entire 3 days, the highlight for me was the opportunity to explore the various sessions being run throughout each day. I attended a lot of talks and pushed myself to learn more about the features about Tableau that I was not perhaps familiar with. There was a wide range of content which appealed to many audiences, and I found myself in a lot of the talks which involved bringing your own laptop- which felt more like seminar/workshop talks. Something that struck me quickly was how engaged everyone was, and everyone really took the opportunity to learn from the experts in the room at all times. This was a very refreshing experience and made the learning-side much more enjoyable. It was also brilliant to see such a large representation of TIL (and Alumni) talks which were spread throughout the 3 days.
There were also a few new features discussed by the ‘Devs on Stage’ talk, which provided a lot of quality-of-life improvements for those working with Tableau. A few highlights for me included integration of TableauGPT into calculated field windows – a feature which as the potential to be incredibly powerful if it is deployed correctly. Another was improvements to the data model- being able to link tables together differently, instead of being restricted to just 1 ‘noodle’ between two tables. This adds complexity to the logical layer, but also makes duplication of data much more avoidable. I’m excited to see whether this gives people more trust in using relationship models in tableau, as they currently still feel like an ambiguous solution at times.
Aside from getting stuck into the content around TC, there were also lots of additional things going on both building up to and during the conference. This involved community-meets ups such as the Data + Woman event on Monday, The data night out on Wednesday, and post-conference drinks which happened daily. It was a great opportunity to network with like-minded people and meet up with people who belonged to the TIL alumni.
To wrap this blog up – it was a brilliant opportunity to go to Vegas and experience my first conference. It was a great opportunity to meet new faces, and improve relationships with current colleagues. I'm already looking forward to San Diego!