This blog post is Human-Centered Content: Written by humans for humans.

Tableau Conference 2025 in San Diego has come and gone! To anyone who attended or were watching from afar, it was clear this conference was about vision of the future – AI-infused features, AI agents and the introduction of the new Tableau Next platform. Amidst this hype one session stood out, offering a refreshing and appreciated look at the present: Devs on Stage.

Year after year, this session is a highlight, offering a glimpse into upcoming innovations directly from the developers building them. This year, however, it felt particularly significant as it shifted the focus back to the core Tableau tools – Prep, Desktop, Server and Cloud – the very tools that analysts and data professionals rely on every single day.

Powering Up Prep and Desktop

With a crowd full of analysts, the session kicked off with significant enhancements aimed to the tools they use most, Prep and Desktop.

Tableau Prep Enhancements

Tableau Prep Builder received key updates designed to extend its power and flexibility:

• Custom Python Scripts in Tableau Cloud: A major step forward is the addition of support for custom Python scripts directly within Tableau Prep flows running in Tableau Cloud. This allows users to move beyond built-in transformations and leverage the vast Python ecosystem for complex data manipulation, statistical modeling or custom cleaning operations.
• Publish to Google Drive: Adding to its output options, Tableau Prep can now publish flow outputs directly to Google Drive. This solves a need for any users needing to deliver data directly to file, allowing you to avoid making users go to a dashboard to download the data manually.

Tableau Desktop Gets Major Love

Tableau Desktop, the heart of Tableau authoring, saw a wealth of updates

• Connect to Tableau Semantics: Tableau Semantics is one of the first major experiences released from Tableau Next. It provides a modern, centralized place to standardize information about your data, including relationships between tables and important calculations. This provides the engine that will drive the analytics and AI answers in Tableau Next, but will also allow for more standardized datasets for your core Tableau experiences.
• Maps — Viewport Parameters: Building on the foundation of Spatial Parameters introduced in late 2024, Tableau is adding “viewport parameters.” This allows a spatial parameter’s value to be set to the currently visible area (the viewport) of a map. In the demo, they showed some great use cases, including having multiple maps in sync, or having a second map serve as a “zoomed” view to allow for greater detail, while still having the big picture at hand. I can’t wait to see what the Tableau community does with this one.
• Custom Overlays via Analytic Pane Extensions: The familiar Analytics pane gets an upgrade with the introduction of Analytic Pane Extensions. This allows developers to create custom analytic objects that users can simply drag and drop onto their visualizations. This could be used to show things like elevation or drive-time on a map with other visualizations.
• Show Me Upgrade (“Choose for me”): I’ve always loved Show Me as a easy way to get started, and now it’s becoming even smarter. Previously, it recommended chart types based on selected data. Now, with the “Choose for me” option, users can select a desired visualization and generate it with suggested dimensions and measures. It’s a great way to lower the barrier to entry for initial data exploration.
• Custom Color Palette Creation: A long-standing request from the community has been addressed: creating custom color palettes no longer requires manually editing the Preferences.tps file. Tableau Desktop is adding a built-in interface for custom palette creation. In one of my favorite uses of AI I saw at the conference, you can also describe the type of pallet you’d like to see and have it automatically generated for you.
• Dynamic Color Palette Ranges: With this update, the color ramp on legends can adjust based on the data currently in view (e.g., after filtering), providing more nuanced visual differentiation within specific data subsets.
• Rounded Corners: Sometimes, it’s the little things that get the biggest cheers. The announcement that users can finally apply rounded corners to dashboard objects (containers, worksheets, etc.) is finally here. This seemingly small aesthetic tweak has been a long time wishlist item and reflects a move towards more modern UI design possibilities within Tableau dashboards, clearly resonating with the community’s desire for more formatting control.

These Desktop enhancements represent a significant investment in the core authoring experience, blending quality-of-life improvements with powerful new analytical and data connection capabilities.

Boosting the Platforms: Pulse, Server and Cloud

Beyond the authoring tools, Devs on Stage showcased important updates across the broader Tableau ecosystem, focusing on AI integration, administration and connectivity.

Tableau Pulse gets Chatty

Tableau Pulse has had a promising start with a focus on Metric-first business intelligence. It provides a simpler experience for users who really need to focus on their core KPIs and metrics. Now, it’s adding Conversational Analytics to its capabilities. This unlocks new ways to interact with metric digests more naturally, allowing follow-up questions in plain language to dig deeper into the “why” behind the numbers. If executed well, this opens better self-service capabilities to a wide range of business users.

Tableau Server Improvements

Administrators managing Tableau Server deployments received welcome news with several key governance and usability features:

• SCIM Support: Tableau Server will now support the System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) protocol. This is a significant enhancement for enterprise deployments, allowing administrators to automate user and group provisioning directly from their central Identity Provider (IdP) like Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD) or Okta. It should help manual user additions or custom scripting, saving time and money.
• Recycle Bin: Finally! A way to save those accidentally deleted dashboards! Addressing another common administrative pain point, both Tableau Server and Tableau Cloud are getting a Recycle Bin. This feature allows administrators or content owners to easily restore accidentally deleted projects, workbooks, or data sources for up to 30 days.
• Admin Logs (User Interactivity): The Activity Log, particularly valuable for Advanced Management users, is being enhanced to capture detailed user interactivity events. This has been another long-requested feature to provide insight on user behaviors. This will enable companies to understand how their users are leveraging dashboards. This granular data provides invaluable insights for auditing purposes, understanding content usage patterns, identifying performance bottlenecks, and optimizing dashboard design for better user experience.

Tableau Cloud Update

For Tableau Cloud users, they are of course getting a lot of the features mentioned above, but another key connectivity enhancement was announced: dbt Support. Tableau Cloud is adding native support for connecting to dbt (data build tool) via Tableau Bridge. This is a huge win giving the popularity of dbt, and now users can directly access and leverage dbt models and metrics within Tableau Cloud, ensuring consistency and reusing the valuable transformation logic and semantic definitions already established in dbt.

Other Notable Updates

Several other announcements rounded out the ecosystem enhancements:

• Google Workspace Add-ons: Out now, Tableau insights can be brought directly into Google Docs and Google Slides. These new add-ons allow embedding dashboards and metrics into your documents and presentations. Excitingly, Google Sheets is planned for the near future. This solves a very real problem for a lot of customers that need to get data into other locations. It’s important to note, however, that while it’s easy to update the metrics and dashboards in these documents, it will still be a manual process requiring a user to click to update.
• Accessibility: Tableau continues its commitment to accessibility, introducing new keyboard shortcuts and actions for navigation and interaction within visualizations on both Desktop and Server/Cloud.
• Published Data Sources in Tableau Semantics: As mentioned earlier, the ability to connect and leverage existing Tableau Published Data Sources within the new Tableau Semantics layer is a key integration point, ensuring that current data assets can participate in the future agentic AI experiences powered by Tableau Next.

Labs Sneak Peek: Voting on the Future

New to Devs on Stage was the “Labs” section, where the developers showcase experimental features and got the Tableau community involved by voting on which ones they’d most like to see prioritized. Three intriguing possibilities were featured:

• Authoring API: The proposed Authoring API would allow developers to programmatically interact with the Tableau Desktop authoring environment itself. The demos showcased compelling use cases, including generating reports via AI, automating dashboard layouts and formatting, creating interactive walkthroughs (similar to features in tools like InterWorks’ own Curator), and even automating the translation of dashboard content into different languages.
• Tableau Pulse Research Agent: The concept was described as similar to OpenAI’s “Deep Research” AI tools but applied directly to the user’s specific data context within Pulse. This experimental AI agent aimed to answer the crucial “why” behind metric changes
• Tableau Sketch: This presented a novel interaction paradigm: filtering data by drawing a shape or pattern. Tableau Sketch would use fuzzy matching to find data points that follow the user-drawn curve. While novel, I failed to think of many ways I’d apply this capability in my own day-to-day use of data.

The Authoring API won by a pretty large margin. This could unlock substantial productivity improvements for developers and analysts, enable entirely new kinds of programmatic or embedded analytics solutions. Tableau is planning further discussion on this API at the upcoming DataDev Day.

Final Thoughts: Celebrating Progress

Overall, the Devs on Stage session at Tableau Conference 2025 was a resounding success, providing a much-needed focus on the core Tableau platform amidst the broader emphasis on AI and Tableau Next.

The announcements showcased a healthy mix of highly anticipated “wishlist items” like rounded corners and built-in custom color palettes with significant workflow enhancers like Python in Prep and Viewport Parameters, crucial enterprise features like SCIM support and the Recycle Bin, and strategic integrations bridging the present and future, such as the Tableau Semantics connector.

While the experimental features, particularly the Authoring API, offer exciting glimpses into potential future directions driven by community feedback, the real strength of Devs on Stage this year was its grounding in practical, tangible improvements. It celebrated the ongoing evolution of the Tableau platform, demonstrating a commitment to making the tools analysts know and love even better. As organizations look to leverage these new capabilities, finding the right path to integrate them effectively will be key — a challenge where expert guidance can make all the difference.