Exploring Tableau Server and Tableau Cloud

Tableau Server and Tableau Cloud are online solutions for sharing, distributing, and collaborating on content created in Tableau Desktop and/or Tableau Public. Its benefits include providing an environment where end users can securely view, explore, and refresh both real-time and scheduled data visualizations. The main difference between Tableau Server and Tableau Cloud is that Tableau Server needs to be maintained by you, while Tableau Cloud is fully hosted in the cloud by Tableau and backed up by Amazon Web Services infrastructure. For ease of reading, we will further refer to both as Tableau Server.

The scope of this chapter is limited to the Tableau Desktop author’s interaction with Tableau Server. Topics such as installation and upgrades, authentication and access, security configuration, and command-line utilities are not related to the Tableau Desktop author’s interaction with Tableau Server and are thus not included...

Publishing a data source to Tableau Server

So, you purchased Tableau Desktop, became a pro dashboard developer, and now you want to share your work with your colleagues. Do they all need a Tableau Desktop license and installation to see your visualizations? Luckily, the answer is: NO! The best way to share Tableau dashboards is on Tableau Server. This way, your colleagues only need a Tableau Server viewing license, which is much cheaper than the developer license, and they can fully interact with the dashboard you built and uploaded to Server. A detailed description of the different roles in Tableau Server license models can be found here: https://help.tableau.com/current/server/en-us/license_manage.htm.

This chapter assumes the reader has access to Tableau Server with sufficient privileges to publish data sources and edit in the web authoring environment. If you do not have access to Tableau Server but would like to work through the exercises in this chapter, consider...

Web authoring

After you have published a dashboard to Tableau Server, how do you go about editing it? Well, Tableau offers two options. In the first option, both you and everyone else who has access and the rights to download the dashboard can download it, edit it in Tableau Desktop, and overwrite the latest version on Tableau Server with a new upload. The other option is to edit the dashboard live on Server. This feature is called web authoring. Web authoring is a Tableau Server feature that provides an interface for authoring that is similar to Tableau Desktop. Originally, the web authoring interface was limited, but more features are introduced with each version. Thus, the capability gap between the Tableau Server web authoring environment and Tableau Desktop has shrunk. The web authoring environment provides robust capabilities for creating and applying table calculations and provides capabilities for creating dashboards.

As of the time of writing, some features are still...

Maintaining workbooks on Tableau Server

We have talked about the dashboard editing options and auto-save, but we have not yet discussed how we can keep track of changes and make sure that we don’t lose important information in the process of producing new information. This section will provide help on how to maintain workbooks on Tableau Server, starting with revision history.

Revision history

You, as a Tableau dashboard developer or even a Tableau Server admin, want to make sure that your users are always looking at the right data. But then this happens: you edit a dashboard and after your edit, the dashboard displays faulty information. A user calls you and wants the old dashboard back immediately. What do you do? Use revision history!

Tableau Server ships with a revision history that ensures that the past 25 versions of each workbook and data source are retrievable. This setting can be enabled or disabled by the Tableau Server admin. In Tableau Desktop, if you...

More Tableau Server settings and features

Once a dashboard has been published, users can set alerts, certify data sources, subscribe, add comments to a dashboard, and more, depending on their permissions. This section will address the different functionalities in two different places: on a worksheet and on a view. Next to those, Tableau Server has many more functionalities, especially settings for site admins, which are—unfortunately—out of the scope of this book.

Features on the worksheet level

By features on the worksheet level, I mean the settings that are available to you after selecting a project and a certain worksheet like so:

Figure 14.23: Tableau Server

On this level, we see eight different tabs, which we will discuss over the next few pages.

Views: Views show a thumbnail of all the worksheets or dashboards that have been published within one workbook. When uploading a workbook to Tableau Server, you can select all the views that should...

Summary

We began this chapter by looking at Tableau Server settings, we learned that revision history features can provide a safety net against inadvertently overwriting files. We explored a section on the Tableau Server web authoring environment, which compared that environment with Tableau Desktop. This section’s main purpose was to establish a knowledge base for determining which personnel should have Tableau Desktop licenses and for whom the web authoring capabilities of Tableau Server should suffice.

Then we discussed user filters. User filters enable the Tableau author to ensure that users are only able to access data for which they have clearance. And finally, we looked at some handy features, such as alerts, subscriptions, commenting, and others.

In the next chapter, we will branch out from the Tableau world and will consider how to integrate it with R and Python. Knowledge of programming integration will help the Tableau author accomplish analytics tasks beyond...