Four months after Salesforce just.com closed its acquisition of Slack, another of its subsidiaries, data visualization platform Tableau Software, is retooling to create Slack its new interface.

For the last couple of years, Tableau has been accumulating a conversational interface it calls Ask Data that allows users to drill into large datasets using natural language. Now, it’s allowing users to ask questions of these data-and share the answers-via Slack.

This week at its online-only Tableau Conference ’21, the business is showing these along with other new features that it hopes will further democratize the usage of data.

Democratize but govern

Slack integration wasn’t even on Tableau’s roadmap this time around last year, and once and for all reason: information on Salesforce’s intend to buy Slack only leaked in late November 2020 . In July 2021 because the deal closed, though, Salesforce has been integrating Slack with everything .

Now it’s Tableau’s turn to supply Slack with three new capabilities:

• • Ask Data in Slack, enabling users to create requests for data or visualizations and obtain answers they can tell other Slack users right in the chat window;

• • Explain Data in Slack, an instrument that provides natural-language explanations in Slack for why outliers in data visualizations buck the trend, and

• • Einstein Discovery in Slack, drawing on Salesforce’s artificial intelligence platform to provide predictions and next-step recommendations predicated on business data.

In the enterprise elsewhere, Tableau is deploying other tools to help expand democratize data, including automating a number of the trickier tasks around data prep and data governance.

“We have to turn what’s typically been an operating job for the few right into a skill for everyone, ” Tableau’s new President and CEO Mark Nelson told reporters of the conference ahead. Nelson stepped around the very best job in March 2021 after 3 years as executive vice president of product development. (His predecessor, Adam Selipsky, is CEO at Amazon Web Services now.)

Tableau Software

Tableau Software Chief Product Officer Francois Ajenstat

On the governance side, Tableau is adding centralized row-level security so administrators can control who is able to access what data, and virtual connections, a fresh feature make it possible for centralized governance of an organization’s Tableau data connections, in accordance with Chief Product Officer Francois Ajenstat.

“Virtual connections and centralized row-level security would be the foundation for security, governance, and trust of our platform, but we’re also adding better integration with a number of the enterprise catalog vendors available on the market, vendors like Collibra, Alation, and Informatica, where all that enterprise metadata can flow into Tableau easily, and any enrichments can flow into those catalogs back,” he said.

Leveraging community

Despite Tableau’s efforts to simplify and speed data preparation with visual tools and AI support, it’s still a pain point for most enterprises. “Customers reveal that 80% of their own time is spent preparing data rather than analyzing data,” Ajenstat said. “You want to flip that ratio round.”

A proven way it aims to achieve that is by allowing users to look at community-developed data prep tools through Prep Extensions also to share their prep flows with the wider community in Tableau Public. “This can enable the Tableau community never to only be about visualizations essentially, but about flows and data preparation also, in order to share guidelines and leverage the energy of this community to understand and collaborate collectively,” Ajenstat said.

Tableau Software

Tableau’s ambition is larger than just enabling everyone within an organization to investigate and visualize data, though: In addition, it really wants to put data analysis atlanta divorce attorneys application by rendering it easier for developers for connecting to Tableau, also to make those connections open to customers through the Tableau Exchange, said Kate Wright, Tableau’s senior vice president of product development.

“The Tableau Exchange can be an evolution of our existing hub of integrated products, service and solutions offerings,” she said. “Customers could have a one stop shop to get offerings that will help them jumpstart their analysis, like our accelerators, our connectors, and our new datasets.”

A window for collaboration

Other tools, to be released in a public beta test soon, will enable developers to let their users to generate Tableau dashboards right of their applications, she said.

Tableau isn’t the only person researching to make it simpler to embed live data in documents and collaboration tools.

Microsoft showed its vision of how this may just work at its Ignite 2021 conference the other day, by means of a fresh application, Microsoft Loop . This can include components that link with Microsoft’s competitor to Salesforce, Dynamics 365, sufficient reason for Teams, Microsoft’s response to Slack.

But there’s a window for collaboration between your two, too. Asked concerning the prospect of bringing Tableau’s capabilities to Teams, Wright said carefully, “Flexibility is among Tableau’s core differentiators, and you want to meet our customers where they’re. We don’t necessarily desire to force them to utilize any particular suite or tools, therefore we have been considering how Tableau may potentially integrate with other collaboration apps certainly.”

Ten million data learners

Tableau CEO Nelson spoke of Tableau’s plans not only to create it easier for employees to gain access to and analyze enterprise data, but additionally to tackle the info skills shortage from the different direction: training.

Tableau Software

The ongoing company has pledged to greatly help train 10 million data learners on the next five years. Tableau’s current programs shall train half-a-million people within the next five years, he said: “This implies amping up our current programs, partnerships, and e-learning. We’ll be adding new training programs and expanding existing ones to greatly help folks from all backgrounds and countries to create essential data skills.”

For enterprises that can’t await that scheduled program to attain fruition, Tableau will offer you a shortcut to filling their data skills shortages: a “hire me” button that users of Tableau Public, the free data visualization platform, can truly add with their profiles so prospective employers will get in touch.