# Tableau 2021.1 preview ahead of release

> 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:** 2021-03-09
- **Format:** Video · 33 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Data visualisation, Industry trends, Tool strategy
- **Tools:** Snowflake; Tableau (ai, ask data, catalog, extensions, lod expressions, prep, public, server)
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/tableau-20211-preview-ahead-of-release
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V66E25y7Jzc

I walk through the features Tableau listed for the upcoming 2021.1 release, ahead of its launch. I explain each item, from the heavy Salesforce and Einstein integration through to quick LODs, web authoring on Tableau Public, Prep writing to Excel, and various server and licensing improvements, flagging which ones excite me and which I still need to test once it ships.

## Key takeaways

- Tableau 2021.1 leans heavily into Salesforce, bringing Einstein Discovery predictions into data sources, dashboards via extensions, and table calculations.
- Quick LODs let you create level-of-detail expressions by dragging a measure onto a dimension, a real boon for web authoring.
- Web authoring is coming to Tableau Public in beta, offloading work from your machine to the browser and connecting to CSVs, JSONs, PDFs, spatial and extract files.
- Tableau Prep can now write directly to Excel, including outputting different information to separate sheets in one file.
- Automated data quality warnings will be triggered by extract refresh and flow run failures, though unreliable Prep Conductor runs could mean false alarms.

## Chapters

- 0:32 Why I'm doing a preview
- 1:37 Salesforce and Einstein integration
- 6:08 Quick LODs
- 7:07 Unified notification experience
- 8:13 Connectivity and Azure improvements
- 9:50 In-product extension gallery
- 11:36 Customer 360 Audiences connector
- 12:49 Ask Data onboarding improvements
- 13:34 Web authoring on Tableau Public
- 15:51 New dashboard extensions on Public
- 20:40 Spatial file support
- 21:28 Web authoring and device designer

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/tableau-20211-preview-ahead-of-release

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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