# Who is Tableau Pulse for? | New in tableau 2024.1

> 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:** 2024-03-12
- **Format:** Video · 11 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Data visualisation, Industry trends, Tool strategy
- **Tools:** Tableau (data modelling, prep, pulse)
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/who-is-tableau-pulse-for-new-in-tableau-2024-1
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTJlOVg8t0M

I tackle the question of who Tableau Pulse is actually for, tracing the journey since Salesforce acquired Tableau and how the AI wave has reshaped the analytics market. I argue Pulse is aimed at the consumers of dashboards, but warn that it leans heavily on creators and developers whose tooling for managing data at scale still falls short.

## Key takeaways

- Tableau Pulse is fundamentally built for the consumers of dashboards and reports, a huge audience Tableau has never had a direct channel to serve.
- Salesforce has steadily steered Tableau towards the cloud and a SaaS model, and even Tableau Desktop is likely to shift to running web code (as Tableau Prep already does via Electron).
- Pulse still depends on creators with licences to build metric definitions, shape published data sources and maintain the underlying data models.
- The combinatorial explosion of metrics (every dimension times every value) creates a sea of metrics that current Tableau tooling struggles to validate, track lineage for, or surface metadata on at scale.
- Pulse is not an original concept (it echoes Alteryx Auto Insights and wider analytics UX patterns), but applying it on the Tableau platform is its genuine USP.

## Chapters

- 0:00 The question and AI's market shift
- 1:14 Salesforce's vision and the cloud journey
- 4:06 Conference tea leaves: serving dashboard consumers
- 6:19 Who Tableau Pulse is really for
- 7:14 Is Tableau Pulse original?
- 8:28 The unsolved creation problem

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/who-is-tableau-pulse-for-new-in-tableau-2024-1

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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