Tableau Desktop Pocket Reference

Chapter 1. Tableau’s Product Ecosystem

The first thing to know as you’re getting started is that you don’t simply “download Tableau.” Tableau is a brand—and under its brand umbrella, it provides a family of end-to-end, self-service analytics products, spanning data engineering to dashboard distribution. The choice of which product you download, use, or access comes down to your role within your organization, the permissions you have to access confidential company data, and/or the trust you have to share insights with others. This chapter covers Tableau’s current product lineup, its licensing model, and version updates.

Tableau Products

Tableau Prep Builder is drag-and-drop data engineering software that allows you to connect to various data sources and prepare them for use with Tableau Desktop or other software programs. With Tableau Prep Builder, you can combine, clean, aggregate, and/or pivot data before either saving it locally or publishing it to a central repository for others to use.

Tableau Prep Conductor, included in Tableau’s Data Management add-on, allows you to schedule and automate the data engineering flows that are developed within Tableau Prep Builder.

Tip

For an in-depth guide to Tableau Prep Builder and Tableau Prep Conductor, check out Tableau Prep: Up & Running by Carl Allchin (O’Reilly, 2020).

Tableau Desktop is drag-and-drop analytics and data visualization software. With Tableau Desktop, you can connect to a wide variety of data sources, explore data of all sizes, create ad hoc analyses on the fly, combine multiple elements into cohesive dashboards for easier consumption, share views with others, and much more. Tableau Desktop is the focus of this book.

Tableau Public is a free version of Tableau Desktop that allows you to connect to a limited number of data source types such as Microsoft Excel and create public analyses. The catch with Tableau Public being free is you must save your work to the public web, where anybody can see it, making it unsuitable for proprietary data. That being said, Tableau Public is a great option for practicing Tableau Desktop and analyzing data sources outside the office or nonprotected company data.

Tableau Server is a central repository, managed by your organization, that stores all published workbooks built in Tableau Desktop, shared data sources, and/or Tableau Prep workflows. With Tableau Server, you can grant access permissions to workbooks and data sources, schedule data refreshes, collaborate on analyses with commenting and email, and make web-based edits to content published from Tableau Desktop.

Tableau Online has nearly all the same functionality as Tableau Server but is hosted by Tableau itself.

Tableau Reader is a free desktop application that allows a user to view and interact with analyses saved as a packaged workbook from Tableau Desktop.

Tableau Mobile is a free mobile app that allows a user to view and interact with analyses published to Tableau Server or Tableau Online.

Tableau License Model 

Tableau uses a license-based model (with the exception of its free Tableau Public product) that bundles several of its flagship products together. Depending on whether a user is a Creator, Explorer, or Viewer determines how they can access files, interact with views, collaborate on analyses, author new analyses, prepare data sources, and govern permissions (Figure 1-1).

Figure 1-1. Tableau products and features by license type. Tableau Server is used to represent both Tableau Server and Tableau Online.

Tableau Version Updates

Tableau is on an aggressive release schedule and provides new product updates to its Prep products as frequently as every month, and the Desktop product as frequently as every three months. As of 2018, Tableau versions list the year first, followed by a period and the sequential release within that year (for example, 2021.3). It is important to know which version of Tableau your company uses so that features are as in sync as possible throughout the organization.

To keep an eye on Tableau’s latest feature offerings, see its New Features page on the website. To download previous versions of Tableau products, see its Releases page.