Data can be complicated to collect and it is often even more complex to understand in a way that brings a business value. Salesforce's Tableau business unit today announced the 2023.1 release of its enterprise platform known as Tableau Server, which can run on-premises or in an organization's own virtual private cloud deployment. Tableau is generally used as a data analytics technology that helps users get insights from data. The new 2023.1 update integrates enhanced features to help organizations connect to data including a data mapping feature that has been designed to make it easier to execute analytics on any data source. There is now also a deeper integration with Salesforce's Slack messaging application in a bid to help users benefit from data analytics directly within Slack.

Tableau was acquired by Salesforce earlier this year for $15.7 billion, but long before that, the company had been working on its Fall update, and today it announced several new tools including a new feature called'Explain Data' that uses AI to get to insight quickly. "What Explain Data does is it moves users from understanding what happened to why it might have happened by automatically uncovering and explaining what's going on in your data. So what we've done is we've embedded a sophisticated statistical engine in Tableau, that when launched automatically analyzes all the data on behalf of the user, and brings up possible explanations of the most relevant factors that are driving a particular data point," Tableau chief product officer, Francois Ajenstat explained. He added that what this really means is that it saves users time by automatically doing the analysis for them, and It should help them do better analysis by removing biases and helping them dive deep into the data in an automated fashion. Ajenstat says this is a major improvement in that previously users would have do all of this work manually.

Seattle, Washington data analytics company Tableau wants to make it easier to get straightforward answers to sales questions. Toward that end, it today announced the general availability of Ask Data, a natural language processing feature for Tableau Server and Tableau Online that enables users to pose queries and get a response. It also debuted Tableau Data Management -- a new subscription add-on targeting data prep scenarios -- and a pair of revamped smartphone clients. Ask Data is available as a part of Tableau's latest release, Tableau 2019.1, and supports the platform's full range of live and extract data sources. Using Ask Data to get an answer is as simple as typing in a question like "What were my sales this month?",