Tableau Extensions: The only limit is your imagination

So, who am I?

Budapest Business Journal, 2001, Jan 15-10

Tamas Foldi

C?O, Starschema Ltd

Tableau Zen Master

Pizza Sponsor

Tableau External Services Connection*

*The Most Underused Tableau Feature

What is this "External Service"?

Tableau supports a set of functions that you can use to pass expressions to external services for integration with R, MATLAB, and Python.

TL;DR

Tableau "Table" calculations in R or Python

TabPy - Python Calcs

https://github.com/tableau/TabPy

But

There is
More

Live Currency Data

Live Connection

Enrich dashboards with live data from web services or non-supported databases

import tabpy_client
from forex_python.converter import CurrencyRates

c = CurrencyRates()
client = tabpy_client.Client('http://localhost:9004/')

def convert_to(target,value):
  lst= []
  rate= c.get_rate('USD',target[0])
  for i in range(0,len(value)) :
    lst.append(value[i]*rate)
  return lst

client.deploy('convert_to',convert_to,'convert from USD', override = True)

Live Web Data - Twitter

Pros

• Advanced Analytics
• Access to thousands of R, Python and Matlab packages
• LIVE CONNECTION TO CUSTOM DATASETS

Cons

• No security for Python 
• Configuration requires some tech skills (Settings in help??? WHY??)

Tableau Extensions*

*Former Project Frelard

Tableau Extension API

The Extensions API lets you do more without leaving Tableau. Build Tableau extensions that can interact and communicate with Tableau, and embed them directly in your workbooks.

https://github.com/tableau/extensions-api

Refresh Dashboard

D3 Brushfilter

D3 Sankey

Associative Filtering

Pagination

This was fun, wasn't it?

But can it do... khm... Excel???

Certainly not...

https://github.com/tableau/extensions-api/issues/61

BUT WE CAN!!!!11

WDC HACK > EXTENSIONS

Thank you

@tfoldi