Planned Tableau 2019.4 Features

• View Recommendations – View Recommendations connect users to relevant data, especially in areas they did not think about looking for. These are PERSONALIZED recommendations of views and dashboards based on matching tastes between similar users – i.e. “You may also like this because similar users as you have viewed this.”
• User Visibility – What is User Visibility? The new site mode blocks user-to-user visibility within a site for Explorer and Viewer licensed users, so that users from different organizations remain anonymous to one another. Creators and administrators see other users to help manage site users, groups, permissions, and content. This setting allows them to serve customers who make Tableau available to multiple external end-users, such as clients, suppliers or partners. How do customers use User Visibility? It’s easy. Go to Site Settings and change User Visibility from Full to Limited. How do user’s appear when User Visibility = “Limited”? In most cases, content owners show up as “Hidden User” in a light grey color).
• Table Visualization Enhancements – In Tableau’s upcoming release, they plan to ship the following table enhancements that have been long requested by their customers: Raise the column limit: Tableau is increasing the column limit for discrete (blue-pills) fields used as headers from 16 to 50.  You can now author wide tables in Tableau Desktop. Enable horizontal scrolling: Table visualizations with discrete (blue-pills) fields can now be scrolled horizontally in Tableau Desktop, Server and Online.
• Custom Welcome Banner on Home Page – Server administrators can add a custom message of text and hyperlinks to the welcome banner on Home page to provide important support information and getting-started resources for their users. They can also turn on or off the default banner to meet their business needs.
• Webhooks – A Webhook is a method and pattern by which external systems can be notified about events that occur within Tableau Server or Tableau Online.  When a supported event occurs within Tableau Server or Online, a message is sent to a location specified by a user.  The content of the message is in JSON format which can be easily parsed by computer systems.  Using this technology 3rd party users can build applications that react to these events by receiving Webhooks and processing them. For the initial launch of Webhooks Tableau will support 12 Events: Workbook Created / Update Delete, Workbook Refresh Started / Succeeded / Failed, Data Source Created / Update Delete, Data Source Refresh Started / Succeeded / Failed. To process Webhooks a 3rd party could either build a custom solution to receive and process events or use an automation service such as Zapier to do so.
• App Lock using Biometrics – For enterprise customers wanting to use long-lived OAuth tokens with the Tableau Mobile app, Tableau is balancing the needs of the IT Admins wanting to add another layer of security (sign-in), with the needs of the Tableau users with these organizations wanting to have this additional sign-in process be nearly frictionless. When this feature is enabled by site admins, Tableau will use Biometrics (or device passcode) to add an additional app locking mechanism when trying to access the Tableau Mobile app.
• Ask Data: Enablement Setting – Server/Site administrators can change the default site setting for Ask Data On/Off. Ask Data is optimized when leveraging curated data sources. Many users elect to build custom data sources for Ask Data and would like better flexibility with enablement setting. In this case, it’s easier to turn the default option to off and light up selected curated data sources designed for Ask Data. The default option is, Enabled by Default.  This setting is only available to Tableau Site/Server Admins.
• Ask Data: Link Sharing – Collaboration is a critical part of the analysis workflow. Link sharing allows users to share interactive Ask Data sheets from a current view without having to save a workbook to the server or site. 
• Ask Data: YoY Table Calcs – Tableau is expanding their natural language calculations toolkit. Year-Over-Year and other time derivatives are now supported questions, alongside complete editing and refinement.  
• Ask Data: Suggestion Categories – Tableau has created four new categories of suggestions to help users better understand the various types of analytical questions that can be asked. These new categories include: Basic data analysis (the five supported analytical functions), date and time, filters, and viz types.
• Ask Data: Keep Only and Exclude Support – When a user selects one or more marks, they can click on “Keep Only” or “Exclude” to filter the values on the viz. A known bug prevented this interaction from working in Ask Data. Any follow-up questions would lose the Keep Only or Exclude selection in the subsequent viz. This adds keep only and exclude support to Ask Data, both from the viz and from user natural language input.
• Tableau Prep: Connect to Cloud Files – Users of Tableau Prep can connect to data files available in Dropbox, Google Drive and One Drive as input. They can then clean, combine and reshape their data and save the output as a local csv file or extract or publish an extract to Server. This flow can be published to Conductor to set up runs on a schedule.
• Tableau Prep: LOD Calculation – Level of Detail (LOD) expressions allow a user to calculate data at multiple levels of granularity in the same table. This was previously possible in Prep, but only by creating a new branch with an aggregation node and then joining at the resulting data back to the original branch. With this new feature, users can compute a LOD expression with a simple statement in the expression editor: { FIXED [Customer]: AVG([Profit]) }.
• Improved table sorting – Tableau has made some improvements to table sorting. 1. In the past, if your table looks like a flat table or a list view clicking on the column header wouldn’t affect the sorting of the table. With 2019.4 however, the table will sort as you’d expect. 2. The sort icon appears now on most field types, including all dimensions and discrete measures. 3. In 2018.2, the sort type Nested was introduced. Depending on what button you clicked, Tableau would apply a Field or a Nested sort. You could change it from the Sort Dialog, which is not available to viewers of the Viz. In 2019.4, Tableau will introduced a new sort dropdown, which allows you to choose between Nested and Field sort.
• Map Layers Pane on the Web – With this capability, worksheet and dashboard authors will be able to customize the look of in-product background maps – from directly in the browser. Users no longer have to open the workbook in Desktop, adjust the background map style and/or layers, and republish the workbook, in order to edit their maps.
• Easy add of automatic phone layouts – With 2019.4, Tableau has announced that with a single click, you can add automatic phone layouts to all your existing dashboards. In 2019.1, Tableau started adding phone layouts to your new dashboards automatically, which helps new dashboards, but it doesn’t help dashboards that already exist. If you have a workbook that was built before 2019.1, chances are it doesn’t have any phone layouts for your dashboards and adding them can be slow and repetitive. In 2019.4, with one click, you can add automatic phone layouts for all your existing dashboards that don’t already have them. Tableau won’t change any dashboards that already have phone layouts and they will not do this automatically, only if the user clicks the button. Tableau’s goal is that by lowering the barrier to creating phone layouts, more phone layouts will exist and their phone consumers will have better experiences.
• Create Extracts in the Web – You can now create extracts in the web! Before this feature, you would need to use Desktop to create extracts for your workbooks and data sources. Now, you can create extracts, and thus performant data sources, directly in the browser.
• Delay Loading of Contents – This Tableau Server only feature expands that capabilities of the show/hide dashboard container feature released with Tableau 2019.2. Show/hide containers enable you to maximize screen real estate by toggling between visible or hidden any floating container on your dashboard. You can use this feature to streamline what content viewers see, such as customizing instructions, filters, or legends to be hidden when they are no longer needed. The new delay loading functionality maked showing/hiding containers even better by improving the load performance of dashboards. Imagine a complex dashboard that takes longer than desired to load on Tableau Server. If you don’t need every worksheet to load at the same time, you can user toggle containers to redesign your dashboard for faster loading. Place worksheets, images, and buttons that don’t need to appear during the initial load in a container set to be hidden by default. On load, only the visible worksheets will get loaded. The other content will load only when the user clicks the button to toggle the container from hidden to shown. This feature will help you create faster loading dashboards that progressively revealed content rather than loading everything at once.
• Worksheet ‘Used In’ – Finding all of the places where a worksheet gets used in a dashboard, story, or viz in tooltip can be be time consuming. Today, in Tableau dashboard editing, there’s a feature called Go to Sheet that enables your to quickly jump from a dashboard to a specific worksheet. 
• Job Management UI – In Tableau Server, users can create tasks such as extract refreshes, subscriptions, or flows, and even have the option to put them on a schedule for the Backgrounder to execute on. These schedules items are referred to as Tasks, and the unique instances of tasks that get kicked off as a result to the schedules are referred to as Jobs. On top of user generated jobs, the Backgrounder also does a number of System backgrounder jobs on behalf of the user to support general Tableau workflows, such as extract reaping or thumbnail generation on publish. The combination of all these jobs means that the Backgrounder uses a lot of resources to process these jobs at various times during the day. With the Job Management UI, Tableau is giving a way for Server and Site admins to view and manage jobs that happen in Server as one of our angles to solve resource management. The Job Management UI is a new page in the main Server bag for admins only and has several high level statistics for jobs, such as the Job ID (which is correlated to the Job ID on the Admin views and can be used to query for jobs against Postgres), the status of that Job, the priority it’s been set, what task type the job belongs to, as well as the current run time (if in-progress) and current queue time (in queued), as well as average historical run and queue times of the jobs. By clicking on the ID of a job, a pop-up will also appear showing more metadata for each job, such as the Job LUID, the content name, content owner, job creator schedule name, project name, and site, and the last successful run time. All this information is serviced in one central location for all jobs that the Backgrounder runs for visibility on job status. There are also high level filters based on status, task type, or time, as well as high level stats on the status of all jobs. Tableau is also introducing the capability to cancel jobs via the UI now, which means jobs no longer have to be cancelled via the Rest API. As an addition to the cancel functionality, Tableau now enable Server and Site Admins to choose recipients of job cancellation e-mails as well as enter notes as a reason for cancellation. Tableau has taken feedback from customers, and have added new features to the Job Management UI compared to the 2019.3 version. New capabilities include:
  • Support for flow job cancellation Support for Encryption at Rest jobs as their own task type (which included filter capabilities)Average queue and run times of jobs so you can understand how the job is performing against its historical runs A Last Successful Run field time to help you understand when the job last successfully completedA Job Creator field to help you understand which user is creating that job for the Backgrounder to runExpanded cancel job UX to enter notes as well as pick recipients of the cancellation e-mail
• Personal Access Tokens – Personal Access Tokens provide individual users the ability to create long-lived authentication tokens that allow them to run automation/tools against Tableau REST APIs without requiring a hard-coded username/password or an interactive login experience.
• Named Sharing and Share What You See – In 2019.4, introduces Named Sharing and Share What You See.
  • Named Sharing – You can enter in the names of any named users on the site to send them a share notification along with a note via email. Shares for workbooks and views have images to provide a helpful preview. You can even share with an unlicensed user or user without permission, but they’ll have to request a license or access to the content to see it. Look for more on Request Access for 2019.4 soon.
  • Share What You See – When sharing a view that has been modified (through selections, filters, zooming, panning), sharing will automatically capture an image and link of what you’re looking at, as long as it doesn’t contain user filters/row-level security. Recipients who receive a link or share email will get a customized view with the same interactions as the sharer, so they have all the context. Tableau has also updated the logic so that if you share while viewing in VizPortal, the recipient will land in VizPortal. If you share from an embedded state, the recipient will land on an embedded view. 
• Request Access – Request access enables users to send a request message to content owners when they don’t have permission to see a project, workbook or view. When a user requests access, an email is routed to right person to help resolve the request, without exposing the identity of the content owner to the requestor. The requesting user is presented with a confirmation page with a link back to see all content of the same type. The receiver of the request gets an email with relevant info and instructions, plus a link back to the content for the purposes of managing permissions.
• SMTP TLS Enhancements – Server Administrators can now configure a custom trust root to use to authenticate the SMTP server they are connecting to using the STARTTLS mechanism. They can also configure server to require SMTP TLS.
• Sheet layouts optimized for phones – With 2019.4 Tableau has announced that sheet layouts are now optimized for phones.
• New Tableau Server Installer for Windows – Tableau will introduce a new Tableau Server installer for Windows in the 2019.4 release. Built with the Windows Installer XML Toolset (WiX), it provides both GUI and Command Line installation options like the current installer. The new installer provides the same functionality as the current installer, but there are some small changes to the GUI and command line interfaces. Why did Tableau make this change? The new installer allows them to go beyond the current installer size limit letting them continue to bring new features and innovations to Tableau Server. By trying the installer now, you can ensure your deployment processes will be ready for the new installer once it’s released.
• Localization – All Tableau products are now localized into 10 languages with new languages added in 2019.2 and 2019.3. The 10 languages are German, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, UK English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Italian.