Taking a Tour of Tableau Next Part 1 of 6 [Reposted]

0:00Good evening.

0:01We are wandering into the world that is Tableau Next.

0:05If you're watching this video, I'm doing this on a new channel.

0:08If you don't know that because you think this is Tableau Tim, it's not.

0:12There's a new feature on YouTube that allows us to essentially collaborate with other creators.

0:16So I'm using it as a way of starting a separate channel for Tableau Next.

0:20If you want Tableau Next in your feed, if you want to follow along as the product evolves, head to that channel.

0:26And you might ask, well, why are you doing it on a separate channel?

0:29It's really simple.

0:30Tableau Next is a different product, it has a different audience on YouTube.

0:34And as a result, um essentially the algorithm will punish me if I put Tableau Next videos on the same feed as Tableau videos because there'll be separate groups of people that really don't want to learn Tableau Next, and there'll be other groups of people who do want to learn Tableau Next.

0:51And the the group that I think wants to learn Tableau Next are Salesforce focused users, I think, in my opinion.

0:58And so I'm trying to create a little bit of separation and give you the choice to tune into the bits you want to follow.

1:04So if you want to do Tableau call, Tableau Tim will stay the same as it is.

1:08Tableau Next with Tim is going to be this channel.

1:11Right.

1:12The second thing is what am I looking at?

1:14Well, this is Tableau Next.

1:16I have to say it's one of the hardest products to get hold of in the Tableau ecosystem.

1:21Pretty much every other product I've been able to try very easily, or even even just sort of know someone who's able to sort of set me up.

1:28Um so I have to say a big thanks to um some individuals within Salesforce who've um you know managed to commandeer some sort of trial for me to use.

1:37Um it comes with some strings attached, i.e., I have to remind them to renew it for me so that I don't lose my demo environment.

1:43And I actually need this because I'm about to build a Tableau Next course uh very very soon.

1:49So this is now my third demo instance that I've gotten access to, and I have to say a lot has changed.

1:54And so what I wanted to do is do something different, which is essentially just record the videos as I navigate the product for the first time, and sort of give you some idea of what is what, and then uh as we do this, I'm also simultaneously taking notes, discovering where things are, trying to frame how the product works.

2:13This is truthfully what I do before a lot of videos.

2:16I sort of record a demo video, I play around with the feature for a bit, and then I try and sort of put my my mind into the frame of the customer, and we go ahead and we build use cases.

2:27So these videos are going to be longer, they'll be a little bit like more unstructured, but I'll have time stamps all the way along.

2:34So if you want to just jump to a specific section, you can you can do that.

2:38But I'm also trying to reduce the amount of editing that I'm doing, and so these will be very sort of lightly edited, and when there's something big that needs editing, of course, we'll do it.

2:48But for now, at least for this next sort of maybe five to ten videos, this will just be a little bit of a peruse on Tableau Next, and I hope you find it useful because I think the product's hard to get hold of, and so hopefully you're going to use this as a way of understanding what the product is.

3:02Okay, what are we looking at right now?

3:05Well, we are inside of Tableau Next itself, and Tableau Next lives inside of the Salesforce ecosystem.

3:10If I just go to the app launcher here on the top and I select view all, you'll see that this is going to be the native uh Salesforce launcher that you're probably used to uh seeing, and you'll have a bunch of different sort of let's say apps within the Salesforce ecosystem.

3:25One of those that I think is important for Tableau Next is Data Cloud.

3:28So if you go ahead and click on that, you'll see that it opens very familiar Salesforce sort of Chrome at the top, and then you're into the Data Cloud Experience.

3:36If I go back in here and I go look at uh the view all option, you'll see if I go to let's say Service Cloud here.

3:44If let's go ahead and click service, I don't think I have any demo content in here.

3:48Actually, I do, um, and it loads pretty much the same same set of information.

3:54So uh long story short, Tableau Next lives inside of the Salesforce ecosystem, and so you're going to need a couple of things a license for Tableau Plus, which is the first component, and some components in the Salesforce ecosystem.

4:09I'm not a hundred percent sure on what those specifically are.

4:12I don't think it's very transparent at the moment, but that's something that will come in due course.

4:16So we're going to focus on Tableau Next for now.

4:19Like I've said before, Tableau um, sorry, data cloud is a very important part of this, but we'll come to that later.

4:25Now, what am I looking at here?

4:27Well, I'm on a home page, I have some basic, let's say, demo information here.

4:32So I'm actually going to hide the recommendations because this isn't generally what you'd see if you're using this product for a lot of time.

4:38Um, this is sort of more the organic experience, and I have to say, this view is far from the vision that we've been shown for the last two years.

4:46The vision is still in development.

4:48I I know that, but um, this is sort of one of the things I really struggle with Salesforce, which is just like what we've been shown, you know, this sort of really nice workspace experience with everything being dynamic, very visual, um, has sort of been massively simplified to um this listical, if that makes sense.

5:05So that is yet to come.

5:07But what we have here is a workspace, and this workspace has uh 20 assets.

5:12You can see that it says here 20 assets.

5:14Now there are different kinds of assets in every workspace.

5:17So you have um dashboards, which are essentially a group of visualizations.

5:22You have the visualizations themselves, which are separate assets.

5:26If I go down, um you'll see that I actually also have another sort of workspace as an asset in here.

5:32Um then we have a semantic model, which is another type of asset, then you have a metric, and if I click show more, it does load more.

5:38You can see there's a whole bunch more metrics here as well, and these metrics are sort of defined in a very specific way.

5:44So just like in Tableau, you have a workbook, a data source, um, you know, um, a bunch of other asset prep flow and stuff like that.

5:52Here you have a semantic model, a metric, a dashboard of visualization, and this is not in the right order, but additionally, you would have something like a data source in here as well.

6:01So that's just uh you know some something to bear in mind.

6:05If you go to the right hand side here, you can see the full list of assets.

6:08So it's quite a nice way of seeing this, and you'll start to you know bump into the concepts that you should see in Data Cloud.

6:16So a data lake object and a data model object, so DMO and DLO calculated inside object, which I think is calculated insights in Salesforce R um have been a bit of a funny thing in Tableau.

6:28So I'll come back to that later, but more or less this is sort of the right hierarchy you should expect.

6:34So you have metrics which sit on top of your data sources, um, semantic models sit on your metrics, uh, workspaces.

6:41I don't know why workspace is there as a level, if that makes sense.

6:45I guess because a semantic model can be in multiple workspaces, so from a hierarchy perspective, that makes sense.

6:51Um, but yeah, you can see everything that you need here.

6:55So that's pretty pretty nice.

6:56Anyway, if I go to the following tab on the left hand side, um, there's no really different because uh essentially this will be for the things that I've decided to, you know, personally follow.

7:07So I'm not following anything at the moment, but I can go ahead and browse, and I get the sort of the same experience.

7:13So following is basically just just the stuff you choose to follow.

7:18Browse is I think the assets that you've either looked at or accessed, but for now we're just going to leave this as is.

7:24The home experience is going to be where we focus.

7:26And so the first thing you typically want to do is um look at a visualization in Tableau, right?

7:31So we'll start right from the top.

7:32What is a dashboard?

7:33Let's go ahead and look at the sales cloud dashboard.

7:36We'll go ahead and click on that and wait for that to load.

7:41Okay, so each of these is a visualization.

7:43You can see it's loaded, nice executive summary, and it's got three tabs.

7:47Pipeline analysis is the other tab, uh, performance trend is the other one.

7:51And so it's really important to highlight something here, which is um these nice visuals you see here, they look very similar to Tableau Pulse, but they are not, they are not Tableau Pulse.

8:03Let me repeat that.

8:04These are not Tableau Pulse, these are metrics inside of Tableau Next, which have the same design language and visual language as Tableau Pulse, but they're not the same thing.

8:15Uh, and so you can bring them into a dashboard very very easily.

8:19And these ones here below are actual visuals, so the standard sort of charts you're used to, and again, nothing sensational here, these are just very simple basic charts.

8:27Um, I think you've all seen a good looking charts on Tableau Public.

8:31So, this is more or less that Tableau DNA, that visual analysis sort of coming through, but I have to say it's got a little bit more of like say a web centric focus.

8:40So it feels like this has been built with React or some of the more modern components out of the gate, and so um, this is a very uh sort of smooth experience, and you do get some interactivity.

8:52So, if you click on these, you do get the ability to filter across, and um, it's quite nice.

8:57It's it's it's it's exactly what you expect.

8:59Some of that sort of native tableau language has sort of come through um and again if you click on you know a specific customer here you see everything's reactive so it's doing the tableau things you would expect sort of the the default things obviously you've got filters across the top as well and that's pretty much um uh like you know a dashboard here in in this world now you might say what is the editing experience like so let's just go into the edit experience and you see you get a canvas very different to what we used to and much much more structured than maybe what we used to um you can see there's this sort of um two components here there's the the canvas itself which has this sort of grid system and then you have um the chart itself which you you you can kind of move around and there are some places you can put it you can't necessarily float things uh straight out of the gate so that might annoy some people but I do like the grid system because it means hey you have some very specific places you can put stuff um no alignment though which is sort of weird but anyway I don't want to sort of go off track here I just want to keep this hyper focused and we're on the executive summary and up here you've got the the different tabs as well so it has kept some of that tableau tab um you know let's say DNA typically this is at the bottom now it's at the top you can rename clone make it first it's all the kind of standard things you'd want to do delete and stuff like that and then as you click on uh these uh charts you'll see that the right hand side changes to reflect what you've clicked on so if I you know go to uh this dashboard and we just click on a chart here, you'll see that this changes to match that chart.

10:33If we click on this chart here, it changes again.

10:35If we click out, it goes back to the general design.

10:38And additionally, you also have this content view, which kind of gives you um some some basic um context.

10:43So this is a template that I believe um is based on a couple of things.

10:51So if I just look at the content, so let's just see this.

10:54So create a data count type.

10:56Um, so these are these are based on the charts.

10:59So if you see when I clicked on that, it took me to this um filter widget here.

11:05So if I click back on the canvas, this content is essentially these filters here at the top.

11:11So account name, account type, account industry is pretty much that.

11:15So um, yeah, you know, it I should have seen this like really obvious thing that says filters.

11:22I can't believe I missed that.

11:24Um, but yeah, it's not entirely obvious.

11:26Again, I'm used to seeing it on the left hand side or wherever it is in Tableau.

11:30So um, yeah, out of the gate.

11:32Um, very very, very familiar but unfamiliar at the same time.

11:39So I'm not gonna do much with this.

11:41Let's just um uh let's just uh exit this.

11:45Actually, let's just go let's just do this.

11:47Let's just say um it really wants me to save.

11:51So, what I will do is I will go back and close this view and I will close without saving.

11:56Here we go, and now we're back onto the dashboard.

11:58So that was one uh dashboard.

12:00Now let's go to visualization.

12:02Um it's a pipeline bucket in this particular case.

12:05So this was on our dashboard.

12:07You can see this in itself is just a very simple chart.

12:09You go hit edit and you get the tableau sort of chrome that you're used to.

12:14So you get some of the um classic left-hand side panel, the marks pane, the usual columns and rows, filters, you get the stuff that you'd expect to get.

12:24And actually, and this makes it very easy to I guess adapt this and change it, it's very straightforward.

12:30Um, and you have a few sort of nice new capabilities as well.

12:34There is also a nice um uh let's say a cleaner design here.

12:38There's a lot less of the sort of let's say noise that you sometimes get in Tableau, but obviously what will happen here is you'll hit a wall very quickly because you'll understand ah crap, I can't do that thing I'm used to doing.

12:48So that is um uh one component there that I think to bear in mind.

12:52Now, another thing you'll notice if you look at the data source a little bit more is that it's broken down slightly differently, so it has some awareness of the Salesforce objects themselves, and obviously we're connected to the sales cloud semantic model in this particular case.

13:07So, and this is actually locked, and it's outside of the sales cloud workplace.

13:11You can visualize its fields, but to add calculated filter parameters, create an extended version of this model.

13:17So, this is nice.

13:17You're getting a little bit of let's say governance coming in, which is basically to say, hey, you don't own this data model, but if you want to uh add stuff to it or change it, you can do so in a model that essentially borrows from this one, but you do it in in a separate space.

13:32So an extended version of this model essentially builds on top of the existing one.

13:35So that's um a pretty pretty nice thing to see there.

13:39Now, one thing I just can't get my head around all this time is when you go to the home page, you go back here.

13:45But the things you open are technically always open here at the top.

13:49So before I close the sales dashboard, but here I can actually leave this open, go back in here, and then we can go look at the sales cloud data model.

13:58So if I go ahead and click that, it opens it in yet another tab, it moves the other one back, and then I'm able to see that.

14:04Okay, so now that we've looked at a visualization, we've looked at a uh dashboard.

14:09Next, we're going to look at a semantic model, and you get a little video about the the Tableau Next capability and essentially tableau semantics.

14:17So I'm just gonna uh not watch this video because I've seen it before, but I'll take you straight into the semantic modeling experience.

14:23And so this is the experience where you can build a semantic model.

14:28If you've ever worked with the DP DBT or built a data model in Tableau, it's kind of akin to that, but it's a little bit more advanced.

14:35I have to say it's a little bit more refined and polished.

14:38It's also a little bit more difficult to get your head around the experience, so it's definitely something you have to spend a bit of time.

14:45But there's a couple of things I love.

14:46Uh, number one, each of these tables obviously are classic Salesforce objects.

14:50If you click on any one of them, you get a little preview of the table here at the bottom.

14:53You can additionally add filters and play around with them as well.

14:57Um, if you click on the relationship, you get the classic sort of familiar uh uh visual that you get in Tableau, where you basically saying, Hey, this is this is what's actually creating the relationship here.

15:07Okay, and because we don't own the sales model, we can't change this.

15:10Uh, this is this is locked in, and um you can see these lines sort of you know work their way through the entire um the tire page, and each of them has their own relationship.

15:22So, what I don't like about this, unlike the tableau desktop data model is actually makes it harder to comprehend.

15:28The tableau model um, like let's say dictates a shape, but the shape makes it easier to comprehend, even though the shape doesn't have an impact on the actual end visualization.

15:37This is something that I covered in the data model video with Kirk Monroe, and so I think that's uh really really nice.

15:43So let's close this and let's dig into sort of this capability a bit more.

15:48So we've got a table, um, and it's coming from a uh an uh an item inside of the Salesforce ecosystem.

15:56In this particular case, it's known as a DLO, sorry, DMO data model object.

15:59Okay, and this data model object is essentially a table.

16:06So the account table, if I expand the table, you see here are the list of accounts and all the different things.

16:12Um there, and then if you click on a field, you get a little bit more context as to what it's about, and you can you can sort of play around with that as well.

16:19Okay.

16:20Now you've got uh metrics, which we've seen already, and metrics are defined on top of the semantic model.

16:27So if I click on this, you see I get the tableau pulse interface almost to build a metric, and I can go ahead and give it the details, set up the value, give it additional dimension, insights.

16:38You can see this exactly, it's almost like they took the code and just copied and pasted it inside of uh tableau next.

16:44Uh they probably did actually do that.

16:47It's so similar, it's uncanny, but it's not called the same thing, which is bizarre.

16:51Um, so all of these metrics have been created, they sit on top of this model object, which is nice.

16:58Calculated fields are created inside of uh the um it's actually a good question.

17:04Where are these created?

17:06Um I would I wonder to say here in the semantic model experience.

17:11Um, you can see all the different tables, and I think this is where it would have to be created.

17:16So because it's it's a calculation that lives in the semantic model rather than a calculation that lives in the asset like the dashboard.

17:23This to me should be the place it's created, and you can do things like define the metadata, give give it some advanced settings around um aggregation, an API name in case you want to call it with the API, um, sentiment directionality, the number of decimal places, all of that is is pretty standard.

17:39So um, yeah, really really cool.

17:41Here's a string function, um, exact same sort of tableau terminology that you're used to, so nothing out of this world.

17:49Um, but yeah, it's it's a pretty straightforward capability.

17:53I have to say I do like this uh feature for a couple of reasons.

17:56Let's just say we go into this table here.

17:58Uh, you see this uh ability to preview your table.

18:01This is obviously the same as the connection window in Tableau.

18:04But this um semantic model has one feature which I think is quite nice, which is the ability to test the model.

18:10So if you click test the model, you can essentially bring in dimensions, let's say count ID, um, you can search a specific uh measure.

18:18So let's say conversion rate, and then you can hit run, and it essentially shows you the values that come from your semantic model.

18:25So just being able to pick those items and run them and test them is actually quite nice, and you even get the semantic query.

18:32So you can even you can then take that and go look at that query inside of uh another tool.

18:38So let me just uh open up VS Code on another screen and I'll show you what this looks like.

18:43Um I should have had this open ahead of time.

18:46Apologies.

18:46So we'll just go ahead and add a new file, text file.

18:49Doing this all off screen.

18:51Um, and you'll see that we get this.

18:56Oh, where is that?

18:58Oh, okay.

18:59I know why.

19:01One second.

19:02So if we go here, you can see that we actually did get the query.

19:05I just pasted it here.

19:06So, what I need to do is word wrap this.

19:08Where's word wrap?

19:09There we go, and that is the query that we pasted in there, and so you can take that query technically and run it um inside of a database to get what the query was generating directly.

19:23Now, it's a little bit to me, it's a little bit noisy.

19:26Um, I really hope that's not what that is, but um, it does give you I guess the full context of this exact calculation and there might be other fields that sit underneath it that are driving it you can actually see the preview of it here as well I copied it but if I actually go over here you get like here we go this is a much better way to to look at it to be honest you I completely forgot this was here so um you can see this experience a little bit buggy maybe because I'm screen recording and that sometimes slows things down but if I go sort of full screen here you can see here we go we get the full context of the query so you can actually see this you can test test um take this in essence almost run it as a sort of test output and make sure that you're always getting the same values which is kind of nice um but um again I don't have too much experience about this so I'll have to dig into it that's what this channel is for so nonetheless let's go ahead and close this up so we've looked at metrics we looked at calculated fields uh parameters are something obviously we're familiar with in Tableau these are just um think of a parameter as a value that's not in a table but it's just the stored value that you can use elsewhere and they typically come from the data though so that's um obviously a good way to get them in so there you go that's your sales cloud um uh you know data model um there is this nice big toggle here that says suggested relationships I don't know why that's not uh enabled or don't know why it's grayed out but we'll look at that once we start getting and editing this I didn't actually go into the editing experience so if I go into the editing experience it's actually largely the same obviously you get the ability remove you're not just browsing anymore, and um you can you can add new things you can add a metric, you can add calculated field, you can add a parameter, logical view, and you can add data objects.

21:10Data objects when you load them up, then start to load the DMO capabilities.

21:15The data lake objects, I believe, in this case, are going to be uh things that you've uploaded directly to the uh data lake.

21:25So select data model objects DMO, data lake objects and calculated insights to build a semantic model.

21:32This is interesting.

21:33I think I need to like school up on the DLO concept a little bit more, but then you there's no calculated insights in here, and there's default spaces that you know this is all coming from.

21:43So all in all, um, quite a lot to cover here.

21:46I think we'll have to go into this into a lot more depth when we do cover it, and we'll we'll really try and sort of pick it apart as part of that um setup.

21:54Let's go back to the home page.

21:56So we've looked at the the sales cloud uh semantic model.

22:00Um, if we go into the sales cloud workspace, this is just a workspace just with this specific um information.

22:07So you can see the hierarchy that we've we've seen at multiple sort of Salesforce and Tableau conferences now, kind of coming into play with um the the dashboard at the top, um, but we don't have sort of much of the interactivity that we've seen before.

22:21So I'll just leave this page here, go back to the home page.

22:24Salescloud, we've looked at that metrics.

22:26We've sort of touched on a little bit.

22:28If I go into one of them, let's just go into pipeline generation.

22:31You'll see that we get the full screen experience.

22:33Uh it's essentially the tableau pulse experience if I'm briefly honest.

22:38And um, you can go ahead and play around with the uh metric now because no data available for the selected filter.

22:46This data must not be loading in.

22:48So let's just say current year hit done.

22:50Let's see if we get any data.

22:52Yeah, we do.

22:53So this data, so I can give you some context.

22:56So this data stopped updating in August.

22:58I believe because this demo instance, um, something stopped happening in August.

22:59I don't know what it is.

23:04Um I think I think the the the mock data they loaded only runs up to into a certain certain date, so that's that makes uh a bit of sense to me.

23:14But it is very similar to the tableau pass experience.

23:17Um, I don't sort of need to repeat that to you.

23:19Um, what else have we not touched yet?

23:22Um that is pretty much everything, actually.

23:25Um, yeah, that's everything on this workspace page.

23:27So just a very quick whistle stop tour of Tableau Next.

23:32Now, obviously, we've we've got so much more to do.

23:35We've got to come in here, upload a data source, uh, set things up, and um, yeah, we'll probably do that over the next couple of weeks.

23:43First thing I'm gonna do though is I will set up a workspace.

23:45We'll just call this uh tableau Tim, and we'll call it um the best workspace ever.

23:52Okay, and so we'll go ahead and create that.

23:55That creates this nice little uh workspace.

23:57So this little icon here, this orange icon with the like four objects in it.

24:02This is the workspace that we're going to be working on in this video series.

24:06We're gonna be adding to it, we'll be bringing in stuff from different places, snowflake, flat files, and maybe even see if we can pull some data from the uh Salesforce ecosystem as well.

24:16But um, the first thing to do would be to connect to some new data set, and if you go ahead and click that, you get the ability to upload a file in the next video.

24:24We'll do that, and we'll actually start building our own little workspace here in Tableau Next.

24:29Thanks for watching.

24:30I'll see you in the next one.