"Since day one, we've put customers at the centre of our product development. Our extensive and passionate Tableau community helps steer our product innovation and keeps us focused on solving our customers' most pressing challenges," said Tableau chief product officer Francois Ajenstat.

"This release brings some of our community's most-requested updates together, empowering our customers to make analytics more interactive and engaging and allowing them to focus on tasks that drive real value and transformation across their organisations."

The new features include:

"Being able to add animated transitions to my dashboards will make it even easier to convey information to viewers, helping them to better understand the data behind my vizzes," said BI and visualisation manager (and Tableau user) Marc Reid.

"From a data storytelling point of view, animations make it much easier for the audience to actually see changes in the data and better understand the transitions between different views."

Dynamic Parameters mean workbooks no longer have to be modified manually to see the effect of changing parameters. Instead, drop-downs and sliders can be used to set parameters within a visualisation.

Other updates in Tableau 2020.1 include login-based licence management; connectors for Google BigQuery, Google Sheets, and Cloudfile; level of detail calculations in Tableau Prep Builder to simplify the preparation and analysis of data; and buffer calculations to answer complex spatial location queries with drag-and-drop simplicity.