# Coming soon in Tableau 2021.3

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2021-09-03
- **Format:** Video · 2933 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Data visualisation, Tool strategy, Industry trends
- **Tools:** Tableau (ai, cloud, embedding, filters, formatting, maps, prep, server)
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/coming-soon-in-tableau-2021-3
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB4Pa6_fGE4

I walk through the new features coming in Tableau 2021.3, starting with the freshly updated coming soon page, before getting hands-on in Tableau Online and Prep. I cover linked tasks in Prep Conductor, generate rows, personal spaces, web authoring formatting and several smaller quality-of-life improvements.

## Key takeaways

- Because Tableau Online upgrades roughly three to four weeks ahead of the general release, many 2021.3 features are already live there even before Tableau Desktop's installer ships.
- Tableau Prep's new Generate Rows step has three modes (serial sequence, fill dates between min/max, and fill the gap for a single record), making date scaffolding for things like open-ticket snapshots far easier than the old union-and-running-total approach.
- Personal Spaces give every user a private area to create and move workbooks; admins can see space usage but not look inside the workbooks themselves.
- Web authoring keeps closing the gap with desktop via a new workbook formatting pane and advanced filtering, though formatting axis number units in the browser still isn't possible.
- You can pull up release-specific documentation by editing the help.tableau.com URL to swap 'current' for 'v2021.3'.

## Chapters

- 0:00 Coming soon page overview
- 2:40 Prep Conductor linked tasks and generate rows
- 5:15 Data quality warnings and web authoring
- 6:27 Slack notifications and personal spaces
- 8:12 Explain data and custom sample workbooks
- 10:42 Data source renaming and spatial improvements
- 14:06 Connectivity and web authoring additions
- 18:20 Data freshness policy and mobile updates
- 23:05 Accessibility improvements
- 24:25 Finding the documentation
- 28:06 Demo: Generate rows in Prep
- 34:44 Demo: Personal spaces

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/coming-soon-in-tableau-2021-3

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just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena