Best Tableau Extensions to help you through volatile times

We still love these Five Tableau Extensions, which help increase analytic adoption by the end user and embrace their preferred data tools. As the Tableau extension library continues to grow, we’ve highlighted a few more extensions to help you drive analytic value from your data, especially during times of uncertainty.

Export All

Developer: The Information Lab

You should try it if… your Tableau end-users use your dashboard to gain insight into where they might find cost-savings opportunities, but they need to dive into the raw data to take action on those insights.

What it does: Export All enables a dashboard’s user to export the data behind a dashboard in a familiar excel format, allowing the user to dive into the numbers and raw records to see detail on the insights the dashboard shows. You can configure the Export All extension to export select sheets or all sheets on a dashboard, including the data behind non-textual visualizations. Within these sheets, you can select which columns to export and the name and location of your exported .xlsx file. Export All allows quick, simple action to be taken on a dashboard’s insights; for example, if you build a dashboard highlighting areas of high purchase price variance, a user can immediately export the purchase orders in question and take this data to suppliers for contract re-negotiation.

Exported Data Behind Time Series Graph

Filter Bookmarks

Developer: Tamr

You should try it if… your visualizations use lots of filters, and each user will drill down differently using these filters.

What it does: Filter Bookmarks allows you to revert all filters on your dashboard to a home base: you can pre set this home to be a set of filters where each user should begin his or her filtering or allow the button to remove all filters from the dashboard when pressed. As times get more volatile, many analysts will be building new dashboards and visualization tools for stakeholders to use in finding cost savings and disruption management opportunities. Filter Bookmarks can allow the analyst to build one dashboard with either a common ground starting point for each type of user or to bookmark the most prevalent filtering schemas for each category leader all within the same dashboard.

Selecting Filters and Reverting to Bookmarked Filters

Date Updater

Developer: Tableau

You should try it if… you’re exploring trends over time or selected time periods that must be updated regularly.

What it does: When you implement Date Updater on a dashboard, everytime you open the dashboard, it will automatically change a chosen parameter to whichever choice you’ve selected (today, beginning of the month, beginning of the current quarter, etc.). This ensures that your dashboards are always reflecting current data depending which time period you’re interested in. Keeping your dashboards current is especially important in highly volatile times such as these, when users will be making key decisions frequently and quickly based on your analytics.

MapBox

Developer: Tamr

You should try it if… you’re doing a lot of geographic analysis of business disruption.

What it does: MapBox gives you several alternatives to the Tableau standard map visualizations, including Cluster, Square Grid, Hex Grid, Voronoi, and Data Elevation. All you need is Latitude and Longitude attributes in your datasource and you’re ready to go. The Hex Grid and Voronoi look pretty, but our favorite is the cluster visualization, which dynamically resizes clusters based on how much you’ve zoomed in or out. We’ve been using MapBox for analytics on the Covid-19 crisis to expand and contract the level of detail of our analysis on data from Johns Hopkins and the World Health Organization current case count.

Zooming in and out of a Cluster Visualization

Steward

Developer: Tamr

You should try it if…your data users need a quick, efficient way to connect with data managers and data stewards.

What it does: Tamr’s Tableau extension, Steward, is designed to boost the quality of analytics. Steward allows users to ask questions about data, point out specific marks they have questions with, and raise other concerns or suggestions directly to the data manager. To use Steward, users mark the data they are concerned about, explain their question, issue, or concern, and tag any connected members of the workspace before sending the request in. Users also have the option of attaching screenshots of the data to highlight their data point. Questions, suggestions, and concerns are all queued in one central location for resolution, allowing Steward to remedy inefficiencies in the data governance workflow and increase productivity. With Steward, you can resolve data issues faster and more efficiently, facilitating successful communication analytics and more accurate analytics. Ultimately, the goal of Steward is to improve continuous data assurance and increase data democratization and data literacy across business teams. And if for some reason you’ve read this far but don’t have Tableau, Steward also has a JavaScript SDK and a Chrome Extension for use with your own web apps.

Reporting a data issue on a dashboard with Tamr Steward

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