Tableau 2020.4 Simplifies Data Preparation with Browser-Based Tableau Prep

Prep Builder in the browser simplifies enterprise and cloud deployments; other features include Resource Monitoring Tool for Linux, enhanced spatial analytics capabilities

Tableau Software, the leading analytics platform, today announced the general availability of Tableau 2020.4, which simplifies enterprise-wide data preparation and analysis by bringing the full suite of Tableau Prep capabilities to the browser on Tableau Server and Tableau Online. This new addition lowers deployment costs across the organization, while simplifying the data prep process by enabling analysts to build and edit their data flows without leaving their web browser. Other capabilities introduced in Tableau 2020.4 include the ability to add unlimited spatial layers to maps, a Resource Monitoring Tool (RMT) now available on Linux, and additional native data connectors.

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“Tableau Prep has taken the tedious task of data preparation and made it accessible to anyone by making it easy, visual, and direct,” said Francois Ajenstat, chief product officer at Tableau. “Now anyone can access, build, and edit their data flows directly in the browser from anywhere, putting full data preparation capabilities in the hands of anyone in the organization. ”

Data Preparation from Anywhere

Tableau Prep Builder is designed to help customers easily combine, shape, and clean their data prior to analyzing it, using the same drag-and-drop simplicity familiar to all Tableau users. New in 2020.4, this process can now be done completely within a web browser, simplifying the experience for organizations while allowing IT administrators to centrally manage deployment and version control without manually updating individual machines. Now, analysts are able to connect to a data source, clean and prepare their data, build dashboards to analyze their data, and even share it – with no desktop required.

“Tableau Prep in the Browser is putting the data prep process in the hands of the people who know the data best, in any browser they can access,” said Carl Allchin of The Information Lab. “This is really going to empower teams to prepare their own data whenever necessary, and unlock all the value that data has to offer.”

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Resource Monitoring on Linux

Tableau Server on Linux has been an invaluable solution for customers who deploy Linux in their IT environments and don’t want to maintain a Windows instance to host their Tableau deployment. With the addition of the Resource Monitoring Tool on Linux in 2020.4, customers with the Server Management Add-on are able to proactively monitor and troubleshoot the health of their deployments, with deep visibility into both hardware and software performance. Previously only available on Windows-based deployments, the RMT on Linux can help customers to identify issues causing slow load times, extract failures, and other critical issues that can impact the experience for end users.

Other features added in Tableau 2020.4 include:

• Enhanced spatial capabilities. Customers analyzing geospatial data are now able to add unlimited marks layers from a single data source to their map visualizations, combining multiple spatial layers and context for a deeper understanding and analysis. In addition, Tableau can now connect directly to spatial data tables in Amazon Redshift, prepare spatial data in Tableau Prep, and create maps while offline with Tableau Server.
• Predictive modeling improvements, including the addition of regularized linear regression and Gaussian process regression to the list of predictive models. Customers can easily change which model to use in the calculation field, and get immediate visual feedback on how that model impacts predictions.
• New and improved connectors, including an update to the Salesforce Connector API that allows direct connections to the latest Salesforce objects, including Work.com. Other new connectors include Datorama and the brand new COVID-19 web data connector to make it easy to access the most up-to-date COVID testing data.

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