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 your project.

Specifically, we’ll look at the following topics:

• Presenting, printing, and exporting
• Sharing with users of Tableau Desktop and Tableau Reader
• Sharing with users of Tableau Server, Tableau Cloud, and Tableau Public

There are no examples to follow in this chapter, but it is highly recommended to read through the material for a solid understanding of the various options available...

Presenting, printing, and exporting

Tableau is primarily designed to build richly interactive visualizations and dashboards for consumption on a screen. This has been our default approach throughout the book as most often, you will expect users to interact with your dashboards and visualizations. However, there are times when you might leverage options for presenting, printing, or exporting as a means of communicating data to your audience.

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:

• Exporting to PowerPoint
• Presentation mode

Tableau Desktop and Server allow you to export directly to PowerPoint. In Tableau Desktop, select File | Export as PowerPoint.... After selecting a location and...

Sharing with users of Tableau Desktop and 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. When you share a packaged workbook, you are sharing extracted and file-based data and images with the end-user. If you share an unpackaged workbook, the other Desktop user will need to connect to the data, have local copies of file-based data sources...

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

Tableau Server, Tableau Cloud (formerly called 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:

	Tableau Server	Tableau Cloud	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...

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. Throughout this book, we’ve considered how to connect to data—whether file-based, in an on-premises database, or in the cloud. You’ve worked through examples of exploring and prepping data to clean it and structure it for analysis. We’ve covered numerous types of visualization and how they can uncover deep analytical insights. The four main types of calculations were explored in depth, giving you the tools to extend the data, analysis, and user interactivity. You’ve built dashboards and told stories with the data. In this chapter, we considered how to share the results of all your work with others.

You now have a solid foundation. At its core, the Tableau platform is intuitive and easy to use. As you dive deeper, the simplicity becomes increasingly...