Data Viz Diary

Events

Sydney Tableau User Group – Viz Best Practices & Tableau AI #DataDev with MCP

Jacob Rothemund

I sent the following out via email after our recent Tableau User Group to all members, but figured I would share here for others. Read on to learn more!

Event Recap

Dear Sydney Tableau User Group Members,

We are thrilled to bring you highlights from our recent event on 9th September 2026. As always, thank you for your continued support and enthusiasm for creating an engaged and vibrant community here in Sydney.

Talk 1: Why some visualisations are instantly understood, by Danni Liu

We kicked off the night with Danni Liu exploring what makes visualisations feel intuitive to people using them. Danni engaged with the audience throughout using examples and interactivity to help drive her points home. She covered everything you need in your kit bag to design charts and dashboards that are clearer, easier to understand and better support decision-making. Better still, if you wanted to refer back to anything from the session, she’s running an encore session TODAY, 15 September at 7:00PM AEST via the Datafam Tableau User Group. [Register Here]

Danni was kind enough to share a few resources and recommendations you can take with you, linked below.

  • Financial Times Visual Vocabulary; a practical guide to choosing visual forms based on the relationship or question you want to communicate [Poster] | [Interactive Version]
  • Colin Ware: Visual Thinking for Design; A useful introduction to how visual perception, attention and cognition influence design [Book]
  • Stephen Few: Information Dashboard Design: Displaying Data for At-a-Glance Monitoring; A practical foundation for dashboard design, particularly around clarity, visual hierarchy and organising information around how people use it [Book]

Talk 2: From Scripts to Conversations: Leveraging Tableau MCP for Custom Workflows, by David Nguyen

David presented an energetic session that blew minds, receiving many oohs, ahs, and multiple applauses. The highlight was most definitely his mixed reality demonstration that really needed to be seen to be believed! David is in the process of ironing out details of when and how he will complete online recordings of his session planned to be run across three dates later this year via the Datafam Tableau User Group. While the dates haven’t been finalised yet, I would highly recommend that you join the User Group in advance to be notified when the events are published.

David shared a lot of detail with me relating to his presentation – read-on below for a recap, including a curated list of resources put together by David relating to his presentation.

  • Tableau Agent & Built-in Trust
    • We demonstrated how Tableau Agent can seamlessly generate dashboard insights and overview summaries to accelerate your workflow. It acts as a powerful Web Authoring assistant to help you build out dashboards and draft complex calculations on the fly. Crucially, backed by the Einstein Trust Layer and Row-Level Security, the AI strictly obeys your permissions; if a user doesn’t have the right access, it securely answers with “no data” to ensure total data governance.
  • Slack Integration via MCP
    • We walked through a quick demonstration of how you can use Slackbot connected via Tableau MCP to bring conversational BI directly into team chat. We showed a video of how to build custom skills and query data sources for instant content discovery, allowing teams to find exactly what they need without ever leaving Slack.
  • Custom GenAI Dashboard Extensions
    • Embedding custom AI directly into your dashboards drastically accelerates time-to-insight and delivers immediate business value. By providing automatic commentary, the GenAI instantly explains the “why”; behind data spikes. We demonstrated how to use different “insight modes” to perfectly tailor the output; so a C-level executive gets a high-level strategic overview, while a regional manager gets actionable, drill-down recommendations from the exact same dashboard. We discussed how the security works by demonstrating that a user without the proper permissions simply cannot execute the insights.
  • Headless Agentic BI & The Agentic Portal
    • We briefly discussed the concept of the Agentic Portal. While we didn’t have time to showcase the live demo this time, we will be dedicating an entire future session to this topic. Powered by a modern stack featuring LangGraph, custom Python MCP tools, and a Next.js Generative UI, we will walk through an end-to-end workflow showing how an AI evaluates user intent, navigates server metadata, consolidates multiple live views into automated PDF reports, and programmatically generates ad-hoc dashboards on the fly; all while maintaining secure connections to your governed data sources!
  • Token Economics
    • We shared a quick example showing how tokens work; where one token is roughly 3/4 of a word. We also explained the pricing mechanics, highlighting the different costs for sending your data to the AI (input tokens) versus getting a response back (output tokens). This simple breakdown gives teams the knowledge they need to accurately estimate their true request expenses!
  • Spatial Analytics in Mixed Reality (MR)
    • We explored the frontier of spatial computing by transforming the room’s floor into an immersive 3D spatial map. We demonstrated how to bind Tableau Spatial Analysis to physical MR interactions, allowing users to dynamically control Tableau’s spatial parameters; like adjusting the search radius; directly from the spatial app. Beyond just bringing Tableau insights into a 3D visualization, we showcased how integrated LLMs can instantly analyse these dynamically filtered zones to deliver rich, contextual AI insights right in front of you.

Resources

1. Free Tableau Developer Sandbox & Community
2. Model Context Protocol (MCP) & Agent Integrations
3. Tableau Agent & Native AI
4. Dashboard Extensions API & Connected Apps
5. REST API & Metadata API (Headless Automation & PDF Export)
6. Row-Level Security
7. Spatial Analytics

Viz for Sustainability Hackathon

A reminder for the upcoming Viz for Sustainability hackathon, run by the Tableau team at Salesforce Tower this October 14. This all-day event will see teams of 3-6 participants compete to build data and analysis skills with Tableau, and build awareness around sustainability. To learn more and register, click here.

We hope to see you at our next User Group gathering! Until then, keep exploring, keep learning, and keep sharing your passion for data.

Best Regards,

Jacob Rothemund, on behalf of the Sydney Tableau User Group Team

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