In a new series of blog posts, what I creatively named as “Python Experiments in Tableau”, I will share a few projects that we are doing in-house to play with Python and Tableau. In the first example we will do something special with the “External Services” functionality: add live data from web services to implement up to date currency conversion calculations in Tableau. All this with only a few lines of code using thanks to TabPy and the Forex Python library.
We are all excited about the great news that Tableau will release its Server version on Linux. Even if I’ve been testing the linux build for a while now, since this feature is currently in Beta I can start sharing tips and tricks that will make others’ (yours perhaps) lives easier. The first is an easy howto, namely how to run a Tableau Server Linux in Docker container. Running the production Server in docker definitely makes no sense, however, for quick and dirty checks or automated testing pipelines (CD/CI) it has it’s own place. So let’s see.
Somewhere around the end of July I was invited to show some magic from our consultancy portfolio in the Server Admin User Group’s virtual meetup. I choose (no, actually Mark choose) two topics: the first was automated query banding (practically server side search and replace to programmatically fill initial sqls for workbooks and data sources) while the second was this consistency checker tool. Why should you care about your repository consistency? Read more, I’ll explain.
SAP ERP systems are probably the best when it comes to robustness, flexibility and extensibility. However, two major issues almost always come up with SAP customers: the lack of operational analytics and the user interface which is… well… not the pinnacle of UI design. SAP constantly promises that they will replace the UI with something new but the reality is that 90% of SAP users still use the traditional SAP GUI. Operational analytics are mostly restricted to simple lists and so called “drilldown reports”.
(Guest blog post from Tamas Holics)
It started with one of my colleague who managed a Tableau case from our end. His client was constantly dissatisfied: her workbooks were significantly faster with embedded data sources compared to published ones. Even if we told her that this is normal, this is the way how life works, so better accept it and let it go. But no, she wanted an explanation. Well, here it is.
Spoiler: this post is about Optimize Extract feature in Tableau and how it works internally. (more…)
I was casually sitting at my desk writing my first ever blog entry here when Tamás Földi walked past my desk. He asked me how much I know about Tableau and JavaScript, because he has a cool idea which he didn’t really manage to find the time to implement yet. He quickly briefed me into what he had in mind and off I went to start coding it. The idea is to place a little spinner or counter into a Tableau Dashboard and as often as the counter ticks call the refresh JavaScript API function to reload the data. All this without embedding the dashboard into an another page. And what if I tell you that this little gem can be reused without any changes in any Dashboards on any Server? I bet you want to see it action first, right? I knew that, so click here to see a live working demo. If you like what you see I’m sure you’ll also enjoy reading the rest of the post where I share how it’s all put together. (more…)
Starting from version 7.5 Spotfire is using Chromium Embedded Framework as a display engine which comes with the well-known Chrome-style Developer Tools. Why is this so great you might ask? There are a couple of good tricks you can do with this one.
Guest blog post by Norbert Ledenyi (more…)
Tableau Software is an R&D heavy company, they’re just continuously throwing new features and releasing new versions. But what if some of our colleagues or clients are still not upgraded to the latest Tableau Desktop version? How can we share our superb new workbook? XML Hacking? Jeff’s converter tool?
Forget all. Tableau Desktop can do it out of the box.
UPDATE: Two months after publishing this post from version 10.2.1 Tableau Software removed the DebugMenu command line option. So from here this is history.
One thing that I realised in Austin: I’m not a Tableau Desktop guy. I’m struggling sometimes even with the easiest densification calcs and my dashboards generally suck. What can I do? Learn Desktop, deep dive and share my findings. Well, I did and the results are below.
Going back to Austin. I spend two hours in the Hackatlon with a Tableau employee called Paul Howie. While he wrote a clever password manager (LastPass) integration to Tableau Desktop I spent most of my time to understand Desktop’s architecture especially the Qt GUI layer (but at the end of the day I did integrate Sever with LastPass as well). We were both pissed off that we did not make into the top three? Honestly, how many people struggle with copying pass database password to Desktop (a lot) vs integration Amazon Alexa with a 3rd party commercial product (a few). And there is no better motivation than resentment (hear me, Ben Lower?) so I started to plan my ultimate solution to open up Tableau Desktop as platform for the masses.
So this is the first part of my journey to write a web REST API for Tableau Desktop (yes, in Tableau Desktop, yes a Tableau REST API) starting with the basics. At the end of this series you will able to inject a web server into Desktop and call tabdoc commands from a nice web UI. Let’s get started.
Today I had the honour to present at the Tableau On Tour London conference. The main focus was the “web data connector trick” that allows one to implement reusable server plugins, explained 
