# Tableau 2020.2 Dashboards in the lineage

> 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:** 2020-05-06
- **Format:** Video · 5 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Data engineering, Analytics, Tool strategy
- **Tools:** Tableau (catalog, cloud, dashboards, lineage, metadata api, server)
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/tableau-2020-2-dashboards-in-the-lineage
- **Watch:** https://www.youtu.be/rYAxsgIcFLw

I walk through a new feature in Tableau 2020.2 that lets you see dashboards within the data lineage of your Tableau assets, part of the Tableau Catalog add-on. Using a Salesforce connection in my test environment, I show how to trace data sources through to workbooks, sheets and dashboards, and analyse the impact of changing a single field.

## Key takeaways

- Seeing dashboards in the lineage requires the Tableau Catalog add-on for Tableau Server or Online; I demonstrate it using a developer version
- Access lineage via External Assets, where clicking a data source reveals its metadata and a right-hand lineage view of connected tables, workbooks, sheets and dashboards
- You can perform impact analysis by selecting a specific field, such as an industry column, to see exactly which sheets, dashboards and owners it affects before making changes
- The same lineage information is queryable programmatically through the Tableau metadata API, so you can pull it into your own custom services
- Lineage is always shown in context of where you are, so you can trace any workbook back to its underlying files, data sources and databases

## Chapters

- 0:00 What is the Tableau Catalog
- 0:24 Accessing lineage via external assets
- 0:55 Dashboards in the lineage view
- 1:32 Field-level impact analysis
- 2:37 Querying lineage with the metadata API
- 3:16 Lineage in context across workbooks

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/tableau-2020-2-dashboards-in-the-lineage

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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