How to Publish a Story in Tableau

Creating a chart in Tableau is one thing, but stringing multiple visualizations together to tell a convincing data-driven narrative is where the real impact happens. Tableau's "Story" feature is designed for exactly this, letting you walk stakeholders through your analysis one step at a time. This guide will show you how to build your narrative points, compile them into a coherent story, and publish it for your audience to see.

What Exactly is a Tableau Story (And Why Use One)?

Think of a Tableau Story as a guided presentation built from your data. Instead of showing a single, dense dashboard packed with every possible metric, a Story allows you to present a sequence of worksheets and dashboards in a specific order. Each step, or "story point," can have its own descriptive caption, highlighting the exact insight you want your audience to focus on at that moment.

Why is this so effective? Because it controls the narrative. You guide the viewer's journey through the data, ensuring they follow your thought process logically. It’s the difference between handing someone a complex map and taking their hand to show them the best route point by point.

Imagine you're presenting quarterly sales performance. A story could look like this:

• Point 1: A line chart showing overall revenue for the quarter. Caption: "Overall, Q2 revenue was up 15% from Q1."
• Point 2: A bar chart breaking down sales by product category. Caption: "We see here that the new '-Pro' line drove a significant portion of that growth."
• Point 3: A map showing sales by region. Caption: "However, the West region underperformed, pulling down our overall growth potential."
• Point 4: A filtered dashboard focusing just on the West region. Caption: "Drilling down into the West, let's investigate why this happened and discuss our plan for Q3."

Each click reveals more context, making a complex analysis easy for anyone to digest. It focuses the conversation and makes your conclusions much more persuasive.

Before You Build: Assemble Your Ingredients

A good story needs good ingredients. Before you even think about the Story feature, you need to have the individual components ready to go. The Story builder simply assembles pieces you've already created. You can't create new charts within the Story editor itself.

Open your Tableau workbook and make sure you have:

• A connected data source: Your data should be loaded and ready.
• Relevant Worksheets: These are the individual charts, tables, and maps that will serve as your story points. For the sales example above, this would be the revenue trend line chart, the product category bar chart, and the regional sales map.
• (Optional) Dashboards: Dashboards are collections of worksheets arranged on a single pane. A dashboard can also serve as a single story point. This is especially useful when you want to show how multiple charts relate to one another at a particular moment in the narrative.

Take a few minutes to review your worksheets and dashboards. Do they clearly represent the data you want to talk about? Are they titled and labeled properly? A little prep here saves a lot of headaches later.

Creating Your Story: A Step-by-Step Guide

Once your worksheets and dashboards are built, you’re ready to become a data storyteller. The process is straightforward and relies on a simple drag-and-drop interface.

1. Create a New Story

At the bottom of your Tableau workbook, you’ll see tabs for your worksheets and dashboards. Look for the "New Story" icon - it looks like a book. Click it.

This will open the Story workspace. It looks a little different from the worksheet or dashboard editors. On the left, you'll see a list of all your existing worksheets and dashboards. The large area on the right is your canvas, where you'll build the story itself.

2. Add Your First Story Point

To start your story, find the first worksheet or dashboard you want to present in the list on the left and drag it onto the canvas. Tableau will automatically create your first story point. Above the canvas, you’ll see a space that says "Add a caption." This is where you write the narrative for this specific point.

For our example, we would drag our "Overall Revenue" line chart onto the canvas and type a caption like: "Overall, Q2 revenue was up 15% from Q1, hitting our quarterly target."

3. Build Your Narrative by Adding More Story Points

Now, let's add the next part of the story. You have two main ways to do this:

• Drag another sheet onto the canvas: To create a new, distinct story point, simply drag another worksheet or dashboard to the right of your current story point's navigator bar. A button that says "Blank" will appear - drop your sheet there to create the next point.
• Duplicate the current point: If your next point is a variation of the current one (e.g., the same chart but with a filter applied), you can click "Duplicate" in the navigator bar. This creates a copy that you can then modify without affecting the original.

Continue this process for your entire narrative, adding captions to each point to explain what the viewer is seeing. A navigator bar (often called a "story scroller" or "caption box") will build up across the top, showing all your points.

4. Customize Your Story Layout

Once you’ve assembled your story points, you can customize the overall feel of the presentation in the Story pane on the left.

• Layout Size: You can select from a range of preset sizes (like Generic Desktop or a specific laptop size) or set a custom size. If you choose "Automatic," Tableau will resize the Story to fit the screen dimensions where it's being viewed. "Fixed" is usually best for maintaining precise control.
• Navigator Style: By default, your story will have caption boxes at the top that the user can click. You can change this style under "Layout." Options include using numbers, dots, or arrows only. Choose the style that best fits how you'll be presenting the information. Arrows are great for a linear presentation, while caption boxes give more context.

Publishing Your Tableau Story

You’ve built your story, added context with captions, and are ready to share it with the world - or at least your team. Publishing a story is the same process as publishing any other workbook in Tableau. You're simply telling Tableau to upload the entire workbook, including your newly created story, to a shared location.

This can either be Tableau Cloud (Tableau's own fully hosted analytics platform), your organization's private Tableau Server, or the free Tableau Public for sharing data visualizations publicly.

Here’s how to do it:

Step 1: Open the Publish Dialog

In the top menu bar of your Tableau Desktop application, go to Server > Publish Workbook...

If you're not already signed in, you'll be prompted to connect to your Tableau Cloud, Server, or Public account. Once connected, the "Publish Workbook" dialog box will appear.

Step 2: Configure the Publish Options

This window has several important settings. Let's walk through them:

• Project: Choose the project or folder on your server where you want the workbook to live. Think of this like choosing a folder on a shared drive.
• Name: Give your workbook a clear, descriptive name. For example, "Q2 Sales Performance Review."
• Description: Add a short description so others understand the purpose of the workbook.
• Sheets: This is a critical step for stories. By default, Tableau might select "All Sheets." Click the "Edit" button next to this. A window will pop up showing every worksheet, dashboard, and story in your workbook. You can uncheck everything except for your main story. This is a best practice for guiding your audience - it ensures that when they open the link, they are taken directly to the 'Story' view, not some random worksheet. This creates a clean, focused user experience.
• Permissions: Here, you can define who can see, edit, and interact with your workbook. Permissions are usually managed by the project folder, so you may not need to change anything here. Your server administrator will typically set up the default rules.
• Generate thumbnails as: You can choose whether user-specific data is embedded in the thumbnail image. The default setting is usually fine.
• Show sheets as tabs: If you are publishing multiple dashboards/views you will probably want to leave it selected. This puts the different views as tabs at the top. On the other hand, if you un-select it, you will need to rely on the navigation you built inside Tableau, for example, creating action between your dashboards.

Step 3: Click Publish

Once you’ve configured everything to your liking, click the blue Publish button at the bottom right. Tableau will package up your workbook and upload it to the server. After a few moments, your web browser will automatically open, showing your beautifully published Tableau Story.

Sharing Your Published Story

Now that your story is live, sharing it is easy. On the Tableau Server/Cloud page displaying your story, you'll find a "Share" icon (it typically looks like three connected dots).

Clicking this will give you two main options:

1. Link: A direct URL that you can copy and paste into an email, Slack message, or document. Anyone with permission and access to the server can view the story with this link.
2. Embed Code: An HTML snippet that you can paste into a webpage, company intranet, or Confluence page. This embeds the interactive story directly into that page, so users don't have to leave the site to view your analysis.

You can also use the "Subscribe" feature to have Tableau automatically email a snapshot of the story to a list of stakeholders on a set schedule (e.g., every Monday at 9 AM).

Final Thoughts

Building and publishing a Tableau Story transforms your raw charts and dashboards into a compelling, easy-to-follow narrative that guides your audience to clear conclusions. By curating the sequence of information and adding explanatory captions, you control the conversation and make sure your key insights land with maximum impact.

Of course, the most time-consuming part of this process can be creating the initial charts and dashboards that serve as building blocks. We built Graphed to simplify this step entirely. Our AI-powered platform lets you connect data sources like Shopify, Google Analytics, and Salesforce, then create entire dashboards and reports simply by asking for what you want in plain English. This lets you skip the manual work of building visualizations and get straight to uncovering the insights needed to craft a powerful story.