Add dashboard extensions directly in Tableau: New in 2021.1

hey it's tim here in today's video i'm going to be taking you through a new feature in tableau 2021.1 and that is the ability to add dashboard extensions directly to your dashboard inside of tableau without having to leave and go add a t-rex file elsewhere essentially they've brought the extension gary into the tool so it makes it much much easier to use now i'm also going to sort of give you an insight into why you might not see this feature immediately inside of your organization because there are a couple of security things to be aware of so i'll go over that as well so that you have some context if you don't see this feature but do have 2021.1 all right let's get stuck in i'm just going to open up this superstore workbook this time i'm not connecting to the data so i'm going to start with a workbook that everyone has in their tablet installation that superstore right here the very first sample workbook and when we open that you'll see that we get a very simple dashboard now in 2021.1 what they've done is they've brought the ability for this extension section here to bring in the extension gallery from the internet now if you've never been to the extension gallery that's fine it's not something that's commonly been advertised in the product but now when you drag this extension icon here onto the dashboard you can just see i'm dragging it across the right hand side and i drop it in you get this nice new interface they're asking you to add an extension now this extension area is essentially um really really brand new to the product a lot of work has gone into categorizing the extension and a lot of work has also gone into the back end way in which these extensions work so there are some categories here on the left hand side you can actually sort of click through these there's a sort of a weird empty one there that might be a bug or something that gets updated in the future but you can actually group these based on different capabilities okay so you can you know bring in new vist types custom viz actions advanced analytics custom filters vis formatting parameters there's a whole range of things here now the really interesting thing here is that some of these are actually done by tablet and some of them are intended for tableau public primarily because they replicate things that we can sometimes do in desktop but it's really really interesting to see some of these features being built by tableau because it starts to hint they're going to be able to add more capabilities in the near future okay so let's have a look at some of these let me show you a couple of uh a couple of these and how how they work if i just um click here and just see if we can find one um here we go filter bookmarks so this particular filter here filter bookmarks is kind of interesting it's made by tablet and another thing to be aware of is that you'll see the sort of this icon here on the right hand side this essentially means this uh extension is sandbox anytime you see this icon it essentially means that this extension is actually running on tableau's own infrastructure if i was to scroll down you'll see that this one particularly here by bistri doesn't have that feature so essentially this extension is running on bistory's server okay so that's a really important extension to be aware of because anytime you see a sandbox extension essentially the only two people involved in the interaction with your data is your own organization and tableau's sandbox environment however if you don't see that icon essentially the only people involved in that transaction is basically uh based on trust so it's your organization and uh whoever has access to the server that's running that extension on behalf of whoever's built the extension so it might not even necessarily be that company depending on what other third-party systems they've used like google analytics or anything else like that to sort of track what's going on okay so it's just something really important to be aware of i'll cover it in more detail at the end but let's just go back to this filter bookmarks if we click on it you'll actually get another page which gives you a lot more information and detail about this particular extension and as you scroll down it gives you some sort of context now this has been available for some time so you can see here works with 2019 for and later um essentially there's been some backwards compatibility built into some of these extensions even though they're new and you can see here that it's actually hosted in the sandboxed area on the tableau servers essentially so you can get a little bit of information you've also got some terms of service which i think is always important to look at if you're an admin and make sure things these things work and you get a bit of a demo to show you how it works so let's just go ahead and add it to the dashboard when we click on that it actually opens up the configuration panel for that extension so in this case it's a text button and the thing to bear in mind here is that most extension developers will have used familiar tableau designs in these extensions but fundamentally this little window here this little window if i just draw a square around it is actually a little window with a browser system running inside of it so this bit is actually the web um now there's a bit of context here that a lot of tableau is actually moving over to the web so there'll be other parts of tableau that feel like a browser but essentially this is all built in the browser so this works pretty much like a web page and you select the things you want to do so in this case i'll have a text button we'll just call it reverse reverb filters um you can do a couple of other things you can save the settings and then hit ok and now you can see that it's actually popped here just behind my name let's drag it up just below region and then we'll drag region down and we'll just put that there and now we're pretty much good to go and we can do a few more things we can actually change the colors so i want to get it to match uh the background color that i've actually got there so you can see here that i can actually just go use my color picker here on the mac click ok and now that matches the the side panel that i've got there on the left i can change the text box color so um i can even change this to black if i would prefer that i think i'd prefer that or actually let's change it to something that matches the visualization something that like this let's see if how this blue works um it's not ideal i think actually you know white is probably the better option so let's open that configure panel again hit text button color and just let's go back to white i think that was a much a better choice in the first instance so i choose this sort of off off gray here click ok and that that i think is better um and then now we're pretty much good to go now there's a weird thing where these don't behave like a typical sheet so they don't sort of compress themselves i'm thinking that's probably maybe just a launch day sort of bug and you'll see that now this is uh sort of size now i think the minimum height for this extension is probably something around 50 pixels so let's just try that and i just want to get rid of the scroll bar so there we go we've kind of spaced that properly and now you can see everything is pretty nicely designed now what this extension does if i set some filters here let's say i go to north and then i drag this profit ratio percentage down so i just look at my unprofitable items you'll see i've made a lot of changes here and it's sort of zoomed in and for some people they just sort of don't know how to reset this so what they'll typically do is go refresh the browser or they'll sort of open and close the workbook without saving it to kind of get back to where they were before what this will do is it remembers the state at which you dragged in everything into the visualization and now when i hit reverse filters it actually goes back to the very beginning without me having to do anything else in the visualization so it's a really really nice reset button to be aware of and it's a really powerful thing and don't forget this one is sandboxed so it's um you know the extension could actually just be working locally on your machine but it also might be working off tableau servers so and there's a little bit of context there let's try one more extension let's drag one from my colleague craig bloodworth at the information lab you'll see here that i have some sort of quick access extensions things that i've already browsed already so if i click the export all function you'll see here this is a nice uh little extension and this one is uh not a sandbox extension so it's using another system essentially to go off and do that you can find out more about it um at the url you can get stuck in but if i click ok i know this is an extension that's been used by lots and lots of people and once we essentially get stuck in here when you click on a quick access extension it opens it straight away it doesn't give you that sort of story about what it is so if you want to go check out this extension by all means go check it out but lots of people use this extension and if i click on sales map and total cell you'll see these are basically charts in my visualization okay and if i just choose each and every one i'm able to sort of choose which order they come in so if i was to export this to excel i'm essentially specifying the order of the sheets that it's going to go out in okay so now if i hit save changes and you'll see that that's pretty much good to go i can now close this and you'll see that the export all function is just sitting right there and we're pretty much ready to go now when you click it you'll see it opens up this window and it's asking me to put it in my downloads folder let's hit save and then once that's saved we'll go over to my downloads folder and check it out so you can see it happens really really quick um let me go to my downloads folder and open that up for you um so here's the excel that was created you can see it's very very fast it's basically got the summary table from that particular visualization and you've got a couple of other things there as well so um extensions are going to be really powerful they're going to open up the capability of tableau to lots and lots and lots of users i'm really excited for this to come to tableau public as well this is going to be available when tableau public goes web first as well so um again a really exciting time for tableau i think um now is probably a good time to talk about some of the security concerns you might sort of see in the context of an organization because of course when i talked about sandboxed extensions and also a non-sandbox extensions and there's a little bit of context to be aware of so i'm not going to pretend to be a security expert i'm going to of course send you to the most reliable source for all of this stuff and that's tableau's own documentation now they have a really good page here that's updated for 2021.1 i'll put a link to this in the description it talks a lot about how to use extensions in the dashboards if you've never used it but it's been updated to reflect some of the new capability now there's a small section here on data and security which talks about network-enabled extensions and sandbox extensions so here you can see that network-enabled extensions run on web servers located outside of your local network okay and sandbox extensions run in a protected environment without access to any other resource or service on the web okay and that sandbox environment is actually run by tableau if you click through to this extension security best practices for deployment you go over to this page and there's a little bit more context about how that all works so essentially you can see here that the sandbust extension is basically a tablet-hosted environment for sandbox for sandbox extensions and essentially has no access to the internet okay so whereas these web servers and these other third-party tools and will have some sort of capability because you essentially have to connect to whatever service they use and in order to do that um you know they need access to the internet okay so it's really important to sort of really get familiar with these security concerns now if you're an admin and you want to know how you can control these extensions enable them disable them this page also has more detail and information it gives you a whole bunch of information about mitigating security threats with networks enabled extensions managing extensions and how they're used uh ways of deploying it as well and you can sort of when you install tableau you can actually switch on specific settings to disable certain types of extensions you might only want to enable for example sandbox extensions on your tablet server on table online you might as well want to also disable certain extension or add certain extensions to your organization because you've gone through some sort of vetting and the key thing to bear in mind is that tableau's own sandbox extensions have been security tested by a third party company that's sort of um the confidence you have there and so there will be information about that i'm sure that you can request off tableau it's probably on this page i just haven't had enough time to to really get into it so again i'm not a security expert but um you know if you're in an organization and for some reason extensions aren't enabled or you can't see the feature this is probably why because um for security reasons the organization needs to do sort of a little bit more thorough testing to enable extensions before they just let people go loose sending their data to random servers across the internet okay so that's pretty much the feature in a nutshell um it's a really nice feature i think this is going to be powerful because it's going to open up a whole world of options for tableau dashboards because um for a long time we've we've often wanted certain chart types and certain capabilities and with extensions that's sort of opened up and extensions aren't new they've been around for a while actually but the problem is the extension gallery has not been in the product so it's not been something obvious for people to sort of explore so you know literally having this uh box right here and having it just one click away here in the bottom left corner i think that's a really big uh sort of value add um for features in terms of tableau okay so that's pretty much it i won't try and go on and on about this but um check it out try it out for yourself play around with it let me know what are your favorite extensions let me know what you're trying out maybe you want to build an extension and check out the tableau developer program that's got lots of support uh there for how you can build extensions just for your organization as well as extensions generally for the community so hopefully um we'll see you building something soon if you're a developer okay thanks for watching and i'll catch you in the next video

Channel: Tableau Tim

Views: 2,523

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: tableau, desktop, salesforce, 2019, 2020, version, tableau prep, tableau online, tableau prep builder, tableau 2021.1 new features, tableau extension gallery, tableau extensions, how to add tableau extensions, tableau 2021, tableau 2021.1, tableau 2021.1 release date, tableau 2021.1 beta, tableau 2021 beta, tableau 2021 roadmap

Id: IDzDPEc-R8Y

Length: 13min 11sec (791 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 26 2021