With the holiday season well upon us, we can’t help but think of all the wonderful giving that’s going to take place in a few short days. But let’s face it, we’ve all pondered about what we’re going to get this year. Don’t tell me you haven’t been eyeing that $100 pair of monogrammed cashmere footie-pajamas. I know you have!

Ok, maybe pajamas aren’t your thing. The point is, we’ve all put a thought or two into what we want for the holidays. That got us to thinking. We know the things we want from friends and family, but what about the things we want at work? Considering we make our living by cranking out Tableau and data goodness, it only makes sense that the things we want would be related to those things. So, what do we want for Vizmas this year?

We asked several of our BI consultants what they’d like Santa (or in this case, more often than not, Tableau) to bring them for Vizmas. We want to preface all of these wishes by saying how amazing Tableau already is. Each new release of Tableau is like Christmas morning for us, and we don’t want to sound greedy. That said, here are 16 things we wish for to make our data lives that much better.

The List

1. “Tableau support for non-Cartesian visualizations (think interactive and non-static graph visualizations in Tableau).”
2. “A native connector between graph databases and Tableau.”
3. “This is already out, but the opening/support of the PostgreSQL database and accompanying data dictionary released last month was like Christmas came early!”
4. “A magical anti-bad-viz button to get rid of worst practices.”
5. “A Show Me button that isn’t virtual. Note: Should not work in bars after midnight or for married individuals.”
6. “I would like to be able to plot related things on common scales without having to have a blending key or ‘scaffold’ data. Example: I have two data sets both have a Date field. Let me plot them both on a single dateline. Another example: I have two data sets that plot x/y values. Let me plot them on the same background image.”
7. “I want Alteryx and Tableau to get married and have baby software that does everything. Then they can invite Vertica and Hadoop to the family reunion.”
8. “I’d like to see navigation around dashboards as a separate entity rather than having to fake filter actions or build URL actions (you can add specifying targets for link actions too).”
9. “I’d like to be able to extend vizzes with JavaScript and embed that code. At the moment, if you use the API, you have to do it in the host. That means you can’t embed the viz with extended functionality in two places without duplicating or extending a viz and hosting it on Tableau Server.”
10. “A ‘Tableau’ for ETL would be my wish. They’re already dipping their toes in the water.”
11. “I guess a general thing is to focus on the user interacting with published content as part of a community. Things like annotating on the web would be good (moderated). Comments that could be stored against a custom view so that you could read the comment against the viz in the context that it was written would also be great.”
12. “A web-based database admin/explorer/query tool.”
13. “Linux support for Tableau Server!”
14. “Event-based, rather than time-based, extract refreshes on Tableau Server.”
15. “Python, JavaScript or other scripting type language integration.”
16. “Custom functions, like custom color palettes, in Tableau.” FYI: We have a solution for that.

Those are just the first things that came to mind for us. We’d love to know what you want for Vizmas. Let us know your wishes in the Comments section below. Or, if you need a Vizmas miracle via expert Tableau consulting or training, get ahold of us today!

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