Smart Analytics
Organizations are looking for new technologies that help more people do sophisticated analysis. At Tableau, we’re investing in analytical capabilities that help anyone—from data scientists to business users—get to answers faster and uncover unanticipated insights through machine learning, statistics, natural language, and smart data prep.
Ask Data
With Ask Data, you can use natural language to ask questions and instantly get a response right in Tableau. Answers come in the form of rich data visualizations with no need to understand the structure of your data, so you can get to your answers faster.
Explain Data
Explain Data helps accelerate your analytics by leveraging the power of AI to explain specific points in your data. Based on advanced statistical models, you are presented with a focused set of explanations so you avoid spending time chasing answers that aren’t there.
Statistical Model Integration
Tableau not only connects to file outputs from MATLAB, R, SAS, and SPSS as data sources, but supports direct integration with R and Python. Run code directly inside Tableau, as well as visualize and manipulate model results from predictive services such as Rserve and TabPy.
Insight to action—even faster
Doug Henschen of Constellation Research and Francois Ajenstat, Tableau Chief Product Officer, discuss smart analytics trends in this interview. Building upon the analytical richness of the Tableau platform, our built-in smart capabilities are designed to both lower the barrier to entry to analytical processes and help advanced users ask more sophisticated questions.
Watch nowAutomated Data Discovery
We’re packaging up powerful algorithms and statistical models in an approachable way, giving our customers new superpowers, and reducing the burden when analyzing complex datasets.
Explain Data
Explain Data helps accelerate your analytics by leveraging the power of AI to explain specific points in your data. Based on advanced statistical models, you are presented with a focused set of explanations so you avoid spending time chasing answers that aren’t there.

Clustering
Automatic clustering is a drag-and-drop function in Tableau, allowing anyone to use a built-in k-means clustering model to find statistically significant groupings in data that might not have otherwise been seen.
More resources
- Webinar: Game-changing analytics in Tableau 10
- Video tutorial: Clustering
Natural Language
Interacting with data using natural language lowers the barrier of entry to insights, helping people answer their questions more quickly without deep, technical data expertise.
Natural language processing
Tableau introduced Ask Data for Tableau Server and Online in Tableau's 2019.1 release. With Ask Data, you can use natural language to ask questions and instantly get a response right in Tableau. Answers come in the form of rich data visualizations with no need to understand the structure of your data, so you can get to your answers faster. Fully integrated in the Tableau platform, Ask Data works with existing data sources with no additional set up needed. Check out an interactive Ask Data demo.
Natural language generation
Bring natural language generation capabilities to your dashboards through our NLG partners including Narrative Science, Automated Insights, and ARRIA. Leveraging Tableau's APIs, these technologies automatically generate text-based descriptions of visualizations to help customers extract more meaning from their data.
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Smart Data Prep
With powerful machine learning, we’ve made self-service data prep more automatic in Tableau. By reducing the amount of manual work needed to combine, shape, and clean data, everyone can get the most from their data faster.
Data interpreter
Data Interpreter helps everyone get to analysis faster by automatically detecting sub-tables, removing unique formatting, and allowing users to quickly and easily pivot and split data from spreadsheets, PDFs, and more.
Fuzzy matching
Fuzzy matching indexes and groups related words by pronunciation or common characters in one click. Powerful algorithms work behind the scenes to help users prep data faster, minimizing manual cleanup.
Smart recommendations
Start your analysis faster with the right data. Tableau uses machine learning to recommend database tables and joins based on your organization's data source usage metrics.
More resources
- Whitepaper: Best practices for tidy data using Tableau Prep
- Product: Tableau Prep, a new data prep solution
- Blog: Introducing recommended tables and smart joins in Tableau 10.3
Predictive Analytics
By packaging powerful predictive models into an easy-to-use experience, we’re bringing predictive capabilities to more people, helping them anticipate changes in their business.
Forecasting
Predict where your business is going. Simply drag and drop to generate a forecast. Tableau automatically selects the forecasting model based on the data, and accounts for seasonality with exponential smoothing.
Statistical model integration
Tableau not only connects to file outputs from MATLAB, R, SAS, and SPSS as data sources, but supports direct integration with R and Python. Run code directly inside Tableau, as well as visualize and manipulate model results from predictive services such as Rserve and TabPy. With statistical model integration, it’s easy for anyone to leverage models built by your data science team.
More resources
- Webinar: Building Advanced Analytics Applications with R and Python
- Whitepaper: Using R and Tableau
- Whitepaper: Advanced Analytics with Tableau