My #TC2026 Devs on Stage Review

Hey everyone, I want to give you my take on Devs on Stage. As always, it is incredible to see the things that Tableau is building. There were a lot of puns, maybe a bit too many. So, if you don't like puns, that's going to get a bit annoying. Um couple overall thoughts before I get into some of the specifics. There were some Tableau next features announced. Nobody really seemed to care. Very little applause. The presenters were fantastic as always. And the hosts were great. And it's nice to see two women up on stage hosting. And also there are the other big thing was there are no release dates announced for any of these. So, I hope we're not let down again. In the past we've seen lots of really cool features shown in Devs on Stage that we never see. There was also a whole new section about Tableau Labs, they call it. And they showed three different products that they that the research team is working on. All super cool. And I'll get to that in just a minute. So, we started Devs on Stage started with Jebron Perkins. And he talked about uh published data sources becoming available on Tableau Public, which is pretty cool. And uh he talked a lot about Tableau Prep. Um got some applause, you know, kind of pockets of applause for that. Um doesn't really matter to me. I don't really use Prep very often. Uh he also talked about the data interpreter coming to Tableau next. And then two things that got pretty decent applause were a Tableau Excel add-in and a Tableau PowerPoint add-in. Those will both be super handy for whenever you want to bring some Tableau visualizations into Excel or PowerPoint. So, that's the end of the first presentation that brought up. Roxanne was second. She showed us how AI search is going to work in Tableau Cloud, which was really neat. At least the use case that she showed was pretty neat. Um you're going to have Tableau Agent in dashboards on Cloud. And also a really neat accessible viz authoring experience in desktop. It's kind of hard to explain, but it's a really neat thing for people that have to design for accessibility. The She also went into two huge features. Um the rest of the things she showed were all in uh most of them were in desktop. Uh the first one is instead of having to use map layers before you turn them off in order to use layers on charts, you're actually going to have layers everywhere. So, no longer having to trick latitude longitude in the rows and columns, you're going to be able to just drag and drop fields onto the view to create layers. So, that's going to be really, really neat. Um also drive time in uh drive time in maps, so you could just pick a point and do a lasso and it'll tell you how far it is to how far you the drive time is from that. That is was super, super cool. Transparent tooltips, although I believe they're not that doesn't mean just yes or no they're transparent or not. I believe you're going to be able to control the opacity of the tooltip. So, that'll be really, really nice for some design features. Um a much easier way to switch between light and dark mode on Tableau Cloud. Vector image support on Tableau Cloud. Dynamic field for formatting that is on um Tableau Desktop. So, what dynamic field formatting means is uh that means that um like typically now, if you want to have one thing formatted as uh let's say you have you're using um you've got multiple measures in the view and you want one of them formatted actually you have one field that could reference two measures. So, for example, uh you have a parameter that allows you to switch between sales and discount. Sales is going to be a number, discount percentage. This new feature, the dynamic field formatting, will let you fill up will let you format a single field into multiple formats. It was really neat. You'll have to look at the back at Devs on Stage for that. Also, being able to control font scaling and phone resize. And I think that was it. Oh, the last one was data-driven formatting. So, what that means is as your data changes, you can change the format of the view. So, you might want to change the colors if they do a certain filtering type or, you know, like picture like you pick a different brand. You pick Coke, everything turns red. You pick Pepsi, everything turns blue. It's kind of like the way I was picturing it was like themes on the fly. So, pretty cool there. And then Taha or sorry, Maha wrapped us up. She showed us a really neat widget on your phone for, you know, if you those little widgets you can have on your home screen or on your lock screen. So, there's going to be a new Tableau widget. And if you want to go into it a bit farther, you tap on it and go straight to Tableau Pulse. Which then you can use Tableau Pulse's Discover AI. They're also bringing Slackbot can now access the Tableau MCP, which is pretty neat if you want to use

Tableau it straight inside of Slack. Um They're trying really hard to bring Tableau into next. So, she showed some features around that. No one seemed to really care. Uh One of the things that So, they have something called Q& A calibration in next. I didn't really know what that meant, but I made a note of that. But one of the things that stuck out in her presentation was that it seems like they're still trying to get management to ask their own questions, basically like type in their own questions. That's just not what management is ever going to do. They have people to do that for them because their time is actually better spent making business decisions than it is querying the data themselves. So, I still think Tableau is really missing the boat trying to under this illusion that like executives are going to like type their own questions and stuff. That's probably very unrealistic. Um and then uh there was the uh hackathon finalist that Larisa announced. So, Tristan Gulian won the uh hackathon. So, that was pretty cool. One thing to note and I don't know if this is an issue or not, but all of the finalists were white dudes. And then we got into Tableau Labs. There were three presentations there starting off with Matthew Miller and he presented something called Tableau Solve and it was absolutely epic. Now, these are all things that they are just like prototype stage maybe. Um not even alpha stage. And what was really neat is he had like a bar chart and he wanted to use the last bar as a forecast. He just kind of like dragged it up and it became a parameter and he called that an override. Um he also showed where you could just like picture Excel when you could just drag a corner and it creates additional rows. That's kind of what they're able to where what he showed you're able to do in Tableau. So, picture, you know, you want to forecast out 10 months, you just drag uh the little um the row down 10 times and you get a 10-month forecast. It was super cool. Auto populates and it's using AI to create the forecast using some type of uh industry standards or something. It goes off and sort of knows what to look for. Um and then there was something called a variance collection uh or sorry, variance was like um uh when you create one of these overrides where you know, you basically it's like a parameter on the fly, uh you can call it a variance or something like that, which basically means it can't be overridden. So, I'm assuming that would end up being where people would have their own uh their kind of own versions of the parameters since they don't want to be able to override each other. Of the three, this one was the fan favorite, which to me showed what people actually use, which is Tableau Desktop. And uh or and Tableau Cloud. So, Esther was second up, and she I think everything that she demoed was in Tableau next. At least it sure looked like that interface. Um but it was never mentioned if it was in next or not. It definitely wasn't in Tableau Cloud. So, I think maybe that was conveniently left out, who knows. Um but it's really cool. Really, really neat interactivity. It's something called a radial layout. Um it allows you to kind of build circular things and um you know, change I don't know. It's really hard to explain, but it was really neat. The interactivity was super cool. And then it finished up. I forget the third presenter's name, but he did something called Project Bongo. Uh and the whole project was named after his dog, so gets a check mark for me there. Um it is all built on top of uh Salesforce's agent framework. Um something called autonomous analysis reporting. Perhaps that was just the title of the view he created. I'm not sure, but that's something I made a note of. But it's his whole idea. So, in this kind of autonomous analysis reporting framework, you would start with an overview, and it would gradually um take you through step by step the kind of um you can think of it as like the thought process. So, you start with the overview. Um so, say it's a bunch of KPIs, and then you would drill down into the findings, and these are all kind of separate tabs as you go across. And then from the findings you go to the insights, and then if you want to look at the SQL behind it, you can do that. And then you can look at the metrics behind that, and then ultimately it makes suggested actions. Now, um he made it very clear that this will not and it can't really replace the domain expert or the data analyst, but it's more designed to assist the analyst. So, that's my wrap-up on Devs on Stage. Some really, really cool stuff. I just wish we knew what the release dates were going to be or if we're going to see them at all.