I thought it might be helpful to share with you a recent experience where I was helping a customer who was complaining of slow performing workbooks. When I arrived their Tableau analyst showed me a couple of workbooks that were performing slowly. What do we mean by slowly? Well, for one of the workbooks, just opening it took ~5 mins!

OK – time to start looking for problems, but where to begin? Fortunately, I’m presenting a session at our customer conference next week (designing efficient workbooks: live on stage) and in it I propose a framework for identifying performance issues.

Basically the top layers are where you are most likely to find performance issues, so you should start looking at the design of the dashboards and calculations (which are easy to fix) before you start looking at the data model or the underlying platform (where often you have less…