Sharing Your Data Story

Throughout this book, we've focused on Tableau Desktop and learned how to visually explore and communicate data with visualizations and dashboards. Once you've made discoveries, designed insightful visualizations, and built stunning dashboards, you're ready to share your data stories.

Tableau enables you to share your work using a variety of methods. In this chapter, we'll take a look at the various ways to share visualizations and dashboards, along with what to consider when deciding how you will share.

Specifically, we'll take a look at the following topics:

• Presenting, printing, and exporting
• Sharing with Tableau Desktop and Tableau Reader
• Sharing with Tableau Server, Tableau Online, and Tableau Public
• Options for presenting your data story
• Additional distribution options with Tableau Server

...

Presenting, printing, and exporting

Tableau is primarily designed to build richly interactive visualizations and dashboards for consumption on a screen. Often, you will expect users to interact with your dashboards and visualizations. However, there are good options for presenting, printing, and exporting in a variety of formats.

Presenting

Tableau gives you multiple options for personally presenting your data story. You might walk your audience through a presentation of a single dashboard or view, or you might create an entire presentation. While there are multiple ways you might structure a presentation, consider the following options:

• Export to PowerPoint
• Presentation Mode

Newer versions of Tableau Desktop and Server...

Sharing with users of Tableau Desktop or Tableau Reader

You may share workbooks with other users of Tableau Desktop and Tableau Reader. We'll consider the options and note some differences in the following sections.

Sharing with Tableau Desktop users

Sharing a workbook with other Tableau Desktop users is fairly straightforward, but there are a few things to consider.

One of the major considerations is whether you will be sharing a packaged workbook (.twbx) or an unpackaged workbook (.twb). Packaged workbooks are single files that contain the workbook (.twb), extracts (.hyper), file-based data sources that have not been extracted (.xls, .xlsx, .txt, .cub, .mdb, and others), custom images, and various other related files...

Sharing with users of Tableau Server, Tableau Online, and Tableau Public

Tableau Server, Tableau Online, and Tableau Public are all variations on the same concept: hosting visualizations and dashboards on a server and allowing users to access them through a web browser.

The following table provides some of the similarities and differences between the products, but as details may change please consult with a Tableau representative prior to making any purchasing decisions:

Product	Tableau Server	Tableau Online	Tableau Public
Description	A server application installed on one or more server machines that hosts views and dashboards created with Tableau Desktop.	A cloud-based service maintained by Tableau Software that hosts views and dashboards created with Tableau Desktop.	A cloud-based service maintained by Tableau Software that hosts views and dashboards created...

Summary

Tableau is an amazing platform for exploring, prepping, and cleaning your data as you create useful and meaningful visualizations and dashboards to understand and communicate key insights. We've considered how to connect to the data, write calculated fields, and design dashboards. In this chapter, we considered how to share the results with others.

You now have a solid foundation. At its core, Tableau is intuitive, transparent, and easy to use. As you dive deeper, the simplicity becomes increasingly beautiful. As you discover new ways to understand your data, solve complex problems, ask new questions, and find new answers in your data, your new Tableau skills will help you uncover new insights hidden in your data.