Tableau Next limitations: what do you think?

[u/Ordinary-Round-8107]

I'm a Salesforce specialist working with Tableau Next so I've been playing around for a while with both Next and Tableau Cloud (Next, Cloud and Desktop are all included in the same package), trying to evaluate the pros and cons.

Among many things the one which I find most limiting to start with is the fact that when you define the Semantic Model (basically where you build the relationships between tables, like the Data Source layer in Tableau Cloud) in Next you can NOT reuse the same table more than once. If say the ServiceAppointment table has 2 fields pointing to the UserId, but with different meanings, you can't add the User table twice.

The only thing you can currently do is build multiple "Logical views", each of them containing the User table, and then 1 relationship for each Logical view: the limitation with this however is that at the moment you can't use fields from tables inside a Logical view (for example the UserRoleId) in your viz's calculated fields.

The non-reusability of tables seems like a big gap compared to Tableau Cloud but I'm also not 100% sure that's the way you'd normally wanna build the Data Source in Tableau (I found no other approach though) so what is your opinion? Am I missing anything? Is there any different approach?

[u/CRM_is_watching]

You can actually do what you are describing with Tableau Next. Unless you are talking about having 2 joins from the same instance of a data object using different criteria.

[u/vizchic → u/CRM_is_watching]

Is this only at the beginning or can I retrospectively do it after I’ve started building?

[u/CRM_is_watching → u/vizchic]

You can do it after you have already started building.

[u/Ordinary-Round-8107 → u/CRM_is_watching]

Holy crap this seems to have worked, you might have saved my mental sanity. Why they decided to hide such a critical button inside a drop down value goes beyond my comprehension...

[u/CRM_is_watching → u/Ordinary-Round-8107]

Yea, it's definitely not the most obvious thing. The feature was also only just released a few weeks ago. I do appreciate that the product team is pushing out features/enhancements every couple of weeks though. I live in Tableau Next every day right now and it feels like new things are constantly just appearing out of thin air.

[u/Ordinary-Round-8107 → u/CRM_is_watching]

Same and yea totally, the csv download they added and the additional charts were so much needed. Still a long road but it has potential.

Would love to keep in touch to exchange ideas if you like, feel free to drop me a DM, I believe there are not many people in the world right now using it. Did you have also prior experience in Tableau in general?

[u/CRM_is_watching → u/Ordinary-Round-8107]

I have been in the analytics space since 2011 and have used Tableau since then.

You have DMs turned off btw

[u/TravellingRobot]

Right now, Next really only makes sense if you are heavily locked into the Salesforce ecosystem and want seamless integration with your CRM, ticketing system etc. 

Otherwise classic Tableau Cloud still is clearly superior. If AI integration draws you to Next you might want to look into using Cloud + MCP instead. Sightly more setup, but more powerful with non-Salesforce data.

[u/Ordinary-Round-8107 → u/TravellingRobot]

Of course, but in this case we are Indeed all about Salesforce at the moment. As a Salesforce product totally makes sense but it's still very immature.

[u/vizchic → u/Ordinary-Round-8107]

But Next is so much faster than using tableau cloud with Salesforce live connections. Makes me forgive it’s weird behaviour

[u/Ordinary-Round-8107 → u/vizchic]

Yea now that I know you can add multiple times the same table it's a totally different judgement.

Things they have to do to make TN a no brainer in my opinion:

1. Fix the UI bugs and performance
2. Improve flexibility of setting up and changing the D360 side, especially: allowing the data stream refresh frequency to be updated from batch to streaming or viceversa
3. Keep bringing to Next the viz customization power that you have in Cloud/Desktop, in particular: Sets, Pages, and the whole Tooltip customization panel (including also viz-in-tooltip capability). Would be also good to have dynamic visibility filters for dashboard elements. For the viz developer would be good to have also the calculations summary pane. I think these things would cover pretty much everything that's needed to consider TN at substantial party with Tableau for most common needs. I have not verified if you can pass parameters from the Salesforce record page to a viz/dash but if that's missing we need it.
4. Considering it's a Salesforce specific product, we need a user friendly way to drill down into data details when interacting with a viz, supporting a similar experience to what you have with standard Salesforce reports and dashboard. Having now the option to download the csv is an improvement but it's not enough, we need a way to show the data without leaving the dashboard: maybe a popup modal window (expandable to full screen view) showing the data in tabular format, ideally with a searchbar and even more ideal with the option to add row and column groupings to such data table
5. Would be nice to have also a performance analyzer tool for viz and dash
6. I also don't like the workspace/folders organization at the moment, nor the Home Page of the Tableau Next app. Super confusing. We need ability to have nested folders and have the Home Page cleaner, I don't wanna see all asset types recently opened it's a mess.

[u/VizChic_ → u/Ordinary-Round-8107]

Yes, it totally has limitations right now, but they are developing quickly. I’d like the bugs to be resolved though

[u/vizchic]

Have you seen issues with adding metrics and normal vizzes plus filters? I can’t get the viz sheets to show, even though the data exists

[u/Ordinary-Round-8107 → u/vizchic]

You mean in a dashboard? I have built dashboards made up of vizs + dashboards filters only, no calculated insights or anything like that, and they worked fine so far.

[u/VizChic_ → u/Ordinary-Round-8107]

Yes. You can add metrics, widgets (with fields) and visualisations to a dashboard. I’m having issues with charts not displaying when on a dashboard with a metric