Every year, the Tableau Conference gives us a glimpse into the future of data visualisation, and this year was no exception. TC25 was a celebration of AI-powered innovation, while also unveiling a range of smaller yet powerful features designed to make everyday work in Tableau faster and more seamless.
Here are some of my favourite newer features – announced at Devs on Stage – that will change the way we build, collaborate and share dashboards.
An Instant Viz with ‘Show Me’
We all know and love Show Me: that panel in Tableau Desktop that helps you choose a chart based on the fields that you select. It’s a very easy, user-friendly way to create charts when first getting started in Tableau. But now, it’s getting a serious upgrade. With the new ‘Choose for me’ option, users can now select a chart type before choosing dimensions or measures. Tableau will then automatically build a visual using the fields it thinks best fit that chart. This is a great feature for prototyping or when you’re looking for inspiration!
Custom Colour Palettes
Finally – more colour control! There is no more need for digging into the Preferences.tps file when creating custom colour palettes. Now it’s possible for users to create their custom palettes directly in the UI. You can manually select your preferred colours, or use AI to generate a palette simply by describing what you want.
During Devs on Stage, Ginger Gloystein demoed this by first manually creating a palette named Ginger’s Jolly Lollies with pink, orange, red, blue, and purple. Then she asked the AI feature to generate a second palette with the phrase: “Create a colour palette based on the orange from Ginger’s Jolly Lollies”, and it worked! Very cool!
Dynamic Colour Ranges
This feature is a great one as well, as it allows colour scales to dynamically adjust based on user selections. This means that the ranges are not ‘locked’ anymore, but change when your data context shifts. With dynamic colour ranges, your visualisations stay accurate and adaptive – automatically adjusting to reflect the story your data is currently telling.
Rounded Corners
I’m pretty sure this feature got the loudest cheers and applauses when I was watching Devs on Stage online, and for good reason! Rounded corners are now natively supported in Tableau, allowing for a more modern and polished look with the Corner Radius function in the Layout Pane. It may sound minor, but it’s a visual tweak the community has wanted for years as it saves a lot of time for those of us who’ve been using images of ’rounded corners’ inside containers or precisely lining up floating objects to get the same look. No more clever hacks needed for this one!
Recycle Bin for Workbooks and Data Sources
Ever deleted a workbook and immediately regretted it? The new Recycle Bin feature means that published workbooks and data sources in Tableau Cloud/Server aren’t instantly wiped – they’re stored for a certain period of time (which you can configure yourself) and can be restored immediately. It’s a small change with major implications for governance, autonomy and peace of mind.
Accessible Navigation (Server/Cloud)
The last features I want to give attention to greatly improves accessibility within dashboards, which Tableau has made great strides in already. Now Tableau has introduced more screen reader support, where users are able to click on a data point (or tooltip) and hear it narrated. Next to this voice over capability, it’s much easier for users to navigate across the viz and interact with actions and filters. These upgrades open the door to more equitable access to dashboards and they align well with best practices I covered in this blog post on BI accessibility.
While most of the headline features of TC25 were all about AI, these smaller upgrades will also make a substantial difference in day-to-day dashboarding. As someone who works closely with clients to build fast, accessible, and beautiful Tableau dashboards, I’m genuinely excited about these new tools. Sometimes, it’s the smallest updates that have the biggest impact.
What features are you most excited to try out?