When I reflect on my journey in Business Intelligence, one of the things that I am grateful for is being exposed to some of the most popular tools in the industry.  However, as the organization that I work for is constantly searching for the best tool, my recent work has been more one-sided as of late with Power BI.  As I have started to document my steps more, I realized that I have let the initial tool that I started my BI journey- Tableau slip a lot further than I would like it to.  As the saying goes, there is no time like the present and with that, I decided to explore more about Tableau to see what has happened since I have last utilized the tool.  In short, there has been so much expansion with Tableau and I am excited to discover the new features!!

Fast forward to last week, I was so fortunate to have seen a post about VizConnect, which is an user community for Tableau that meets a couple of times per week to discuss various aspects of Tableau and assists with making visualizations and dashboards more effective in telling a story.  I was able to attend the presentation which happened to feature two great and highly respected speakers.  The speakers gave a great presentation about utilizing the Tableau APIs and how to plot data points on a background image.  Both topics are useful in their own rights.  Interacting with APIs (regardless of the tool) can only be a good thing and helps with automating and saving time performing different tasks. Being able to plot data points on a background image gives one that extra panache when you need something beyond a line or bar graph and is a useful skill to know in a pinch.  If you are interested in taking a look, the presentation is here.  If there are any questions or if you want to learn more, feel free to contact the speakers here and here.