Tune in to use collections, playlists for your data from What’s New

Take a look at what you have in your music library. You’ve got songs from different albums, artists, and even genres. You probably have music for different moods, activities, or times of day. Just like with songs, the data you use isn’t always contained in the same project on your Tableau site. And you might have trouble remembering where to find the assets you don’t use regularly.

With our new collections feature, you can gather the data from across your site and organize them to fit how you use them—just like playlists! 

If you’re a Tableau Online customer interested in getting an early look at collections, you can sign up to join our Tableau 2020.4 Collections Limited Preview Program. We’ll reach out to enable collections for your site so your users can try it out.

Many customers model their Tableau sites and projects after their organizational structures: by departments, regions, or a nested hierarchy of both. But when it comes to using data, most people collaborate with other teams and departments. Often, this means navigating in and out of different projects to get to the right data and content. 

Collections introduce the ability to curate content from across various projects—helping users navigate and find the content they need in the context of how they need to use it. You can promote specific content to help new users find relevant data, align content to workflow processes for easier reviewing or archiving, and even use collections in meetings and quarterly reviews to ensure everyone is referencing the same dashboards. 

Collections function as lists—you aren’t making copies of your assets, moving them in or out of their project folders, or changing any security permissions. You can keep a collection private just for you, or make it public so others can search for and use it, too. And the same content can be added to different collections, helping keep data conversations centered around a single source of truth.

Once collections are enabled for your Tableau Online site, you’ll see a new option in the left navigation for collections. Here, you’ll find all the collections you have access to—the ones you own and the ones in your site that have been made public. You can also see the collections you own on a tab in My Content.

As long as you’re a licensed user on a site, you can create a collection! Click the New Collection button at the top of the collections page to create your collection and edit the default name. As you browse through projects, add content to your collection right from the item’s action menu.

Or, select multiple assets and use the multi-select action menu to add them all to a collection.

You can add many kinds of data assets from your site to a collection, including workbooks, Prep flows, and even data roles. Currently, you can’t add a collection to another collection, or add custom views, databases, and tables.

Just like playlists, you can share collections and help others find the data you’ve curated for specific projects, meetings, or tasks. By default, collections are made private so that only you (and administrators) can see them.

To share a collection, you’ll need to change its permissions to public—this allows anyone on the site to browse and find it.

You can also choose to send a note to let your colleagues know about the collection. When you use the Share button to send a link to your collection, the recipients will get an email. Plus, the collection will appear in their Shared with Me channel on the Home page in Tableau Online to make it easy for them to find again.

Even though the collection is public, the security permissions for each of the items within it won’t change—people will only see the data they have access to.

We’re excited to release this new feature to all of our customers, but first we’d love to hear from you! If you’re a Tableau Online customer and are interested in getting an early look at collections, you can learn more about how to use collections and sign up to join our Tableau 2020.4 Collections Limited Preview Program. We’ll reach out to enable collections for your site so your users can try it out.

Your feedback is important to us to better understand how you engage with data so we can build experiences that serve your needs—so thank you! We can’t wait to see all the great ways you’ll use this new feature.