# What's coming soon in Tableau 2021.2

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2021-06-15
- **Format:** Video · 2737 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Data visualisation, Tool strategy, Industry trends
- **Tools:** Tableau (ask data, cloud, collections, data catalog, explain data, maps, prep, server, web authoring)
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/what-s-coming-soon-in-tableau-2021-2
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23oHov2tF2U

I walk through Tableau's coming soon page to preview the 2021.2 release, covering everything from Ask Data and Explain Data for viewers to spatial area calculations, Tableau Server in a container, and the long-awaited bulk rename in Prep. I share my reactions to each feature and flag the bits I'm still unsure about.

## Key takeaways

- Ask Data and Explain Data are being extended to viewer licences, reflecting a broader shift towards empowering the majority of Tableau users who never build content.
- Area spatial calculations are accurate for small geographies like parks or airports but unreliable for large areas such as countries or continents because of map projection distortion.
- Tableau Server in a container makes Tableau far easier to slot into existing cloud infrastructure and reduces licensing overhead by sharing one OS instance.
- Bulk rename in Prep lets you add, remove or rename prefixes and suffixes and do pattern-based find-and-replace across many fields at once, a huge time-saver for messy Salesforce sources.
- Data freshness improvements via the Hyper API and REST API let you push updates to extracts on demand, so the refresh timestamp reflects when your ETL actually finished rather than when a schedule ran.

## Chapters

- 0:00 Previewing the coming soon page
- 1:26 Why Tableau Online updates land early
- 2:57 Ask Data and Explain Data for viewers
- 8:13 Collections
- 9:55 Connected desktop for web authoring
- 11:20 Salesforce jumpstart and native connectors
- 13:44 Area and spatial calculations
- 17:11 Map layer controls
- 17:54 Tableau Server in a container
- 20:50 BigQuery, MFA and admin insights
- 24:40 Web authoring and analytics extensions
- 27:00 Data freshness and connector SDK

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/what-s-coming-soon-in-tableau-2021-2

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just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena