Part of being a Tableau Centre of Excellence is ensuring you regularly keep your users informed of new Tableau developments, whether they be interactors or publishers.
Having recently upgraded Tableau Server to 10.5 I wanted to shared with you my reflections on 10.5 but from a slightly unusual perspective; what 10.5 means for Tableau Server interactors, i.e. your self-service analytics customers.
The 'No project' blank screen
With 10.5, Tableau implemented nested projects; a new feature that could be really useful for enterprise Server environments. Nested projects allow you to place 'sub-projects' within a project, allowing you to manage how users navigate through content and creating a more structured hierarchy for your workbooks and views. We certainly plan to use nested projects to enhance the Tableau Server experience for our interactors.
You need to be aware that should you not include any nested projects on your Server, users will be greeted by a 'No projects' blank screen when they click on a Project. The workbooks and views are still available to them, however one additional click is required to access them with the user needing to click 'Workbooks' or 'Views'.
Where have the Advanced Filters gone?
Many of our users utilise the Advanced Filters panel in Tableau Server to search and filter content to meet their specific needs. This is where a user can search for a workbook or view by entering a particular word or string, filter content by tags or owner and also limit content to only their favourites.
Prior to 10.5 the Advanced Filters panel was permanently visible on the left side of the screen; in 10.5 it is defaulted to being hidden and located on the right of the screen. For a user to view the Advanced Filters panel they have to click the icon highlighted in the example provided (right).
Uploading a profile picture
10.5 gives your Server users the chance to personalise their profile and upload a profile picture to their account. This may not seem like a big deal, but you may be suprised at how well received it is among your interactors! Within 5 minutes of sending out the 'Tableau 10.5 - What it means to you' upgrade release note I received 3 emails from individuals, all saying how cool it was that they could now personalise their profile.
Uploading a profile picture is pretty simple...
1. Click on the white circle with your initials, where in previous versions your name used to be
This will drop down your account options, select the 'My Account Settings' option.
2. Click on your initial circle that is displayed on your Account Setting page
Tableau will allow you to choose an image from your Computer and upload this as your profile picture, simple!
The download 'Full data' bug
It does not happen often but I found a bug following upgrading Tableau Server (and credit where credit is due, I raised a support ticket and within 3 hours I was contacted to say the developers were aware of it and working on a solution).
The bug occurs when you attempt to download ‘Full data’ from a chart or table within a report; downloading only summary data is not impacted and this functionality still works correctly. The steps to download data are the same as they were in the previous version of Tableau; however the issue occurs when you open the exported data in Excel.
Tableau is including a number of superfluous commas in the exported text data file and as such Excel is interpreting these additional commas as additional columns. This will cause your exported data to be misaligned with the column headers in Excel and for a number of blank columns to appear.
Whilst Tableau work to resolve the issue there is a local workaround that will allow you to open the exported ‘Full data’ text file and for it to appear correctly in Excel (i.e. with no blank or offset columns):
Step 1: When exporting the ‘Full data’ from Tableau choose to save the exported text file rather than opening it
Step 2: Import data into Excel using ‘From Text’ option
Step 3: Choose Delimited file type
Step 4: Select Comma delimiter and tick consecutive delimiters
Hey presto, click Finish and your exported 'Full data' text file will load correctly!
I appreciate this 10.5 summary is not the most technical of overviews but I hope you will it useful in terms of keeping your interactors informed of changes that will help maximise their user experience.
PS if you would like to take our 'Tableau 10.5 - What it means to you' interactor upgrade release note you are welcome to download it from the 'Documents' page of my blog site and re-brand it as your own.