My Favorite Spring ’22 Features for Tableau CRM

As with any Salesforce release, Spring ’22 is PACKED with amazing features, updates, and stuff that makes me drool. Since I changed jobs a little over a week ago, I haven’t been hands-on in Tableau CRM and I’m really really missing it! Before I left, I filled our team Slack channel with all the amazing stuff that I wanted to implement, and so I’m sharing here now too, mostly because I just want to geek out about it some more. 🤓

Do you also geek out over release notes? You can find the full list of new features coming to Tableau CRM here. I’ll break down my favorites from each section, following the same structure so that its easier for you to follow if you’re checking the release notes too.

Analytics Data Integration

Everything in Tableau CRM starts with integrating your data, so this is a big section. I count 17 features here! Whoa, they’ve been busy! One of the BEST of these features, and something that will make every consultant’s life easier: configuring your fiscal year. Previously, if you wanted to have a fiscal offset in your datasets, it had to be configured on each date value that you digest.

Check Your Data at a Glance in Data Manager (Beta)

Data Manager gets better and better every year, and with this release we’re getting tools to monitor usage. Note that it seems like we’ll still have access to the normal Data Manager and then also this new version. These new views will make monitoring and troubleshooting a breeze!

Adopt the New and Improved Tableau CRM Connectors

They are going to automatically switch everyone to the new versions of the connectors during the Winter ’23 release, but you should just start using them now! I actually got the chance to work with the Tableau CRM team on testing some of these and that was a really cool experience. The new versions have better performance, and more options. Check the notes for the full list of which connectors got an upgrade.

Analytics Prebuilt Apps

I loooove the Salesforce templated apps. I’ve mentioned before that I rarely actually use them with my end users, but they give me inspiration and best practices that I steal and use elsewhere. There’s an updated version of the Customer Insights app that includes our beloved Pipeline Trending Waterfall Chart. I actually love this whole app and recommend that everyone try it out, at least in a sandbox. They’ve built it with examples of the new component widgets and a beautiful design that matches what you’d see in the new design look book (also a must read!)

Analytics App Building

This is the bread and butter of why you have the platform, and there is no shortage of new features for designing and visualizing.

Include Custom Functionality in Tableau CRM Dashboards with Lightning Web Components (Generally Available)

LWC’s in dashboards are now generally available. I haven’t built or used any of these yet, but I love the idea! Now is the time everyone should review their wish lists of what they wanted to do but couldn’t, or just evaluate existing dashboards and ask questions about how you could improve their functionality or actionability with the use of a LWC.

Turn Detailed Data into Eye-Catching Insights with Repeater Widgets (Generally Available)

This is one of the most amazing new features, and maybe my favorite?! The ability to create a template for your result rows and show them in different components. You can put together some really beautiful things here and present data to your users in an eye-catching and pleasing way that before took a lot of time and effort. Look out for more blog posts on this feature in particular because I’m SO excited for it!

Resize Table Columns and Wrap Text to Fit Content

I feel like this is something we should have had all along, but am so happy that we have it now! Remember when they released text formatting and it changed our lives? This is the next that! Such a simple feature with a big impact on making your dashboards and your design more usable.

Tableau CRM for Everyone

I looove the improvements that have been coming to navigation in the platform.

Add Collections Directly to Your Lightning Pages

This is a new component that you can embed directly on Lightning pages. I already loved the Collection feature that we got a couple releases ago, and this is just making it better – making it easier for you to share sets of assets with your users where and when they need them. So excited to start using this component!

Share Dashboard Views Through Collections

When I first saw this one, I truly started drooling. Saved views are a great feature, but they are set at the user level. This feature now allows you to share those precise and filtered views as part of a collection. This is HUGE in terms of usability and shareability and is likely going to be one of the most used features.

Final Thoughts

Of course there are tons more features packed into Spring ’22, like features for Einstein Discovery, mobile apps, and SQL. These are just my favorites! Check out the full list (I count 59 new features I think?) at the release notes and happy geeking out!