How to Share a Tableau Story

Building a compelling Tableau Story is a fantastic way to turn complex data into a clear, guided narrative. But once you've perfected your story points and insights, the final step is getting it in front of the right audience. This article will guide you through the various ways to share your Tableau story, from secure internal publishing to public showcases.

A Quick Refresher: What is a Tableau Story?

Think of a Tableau Story as a guided presentation built with data. It's a sequence of individual worksheets or dashboards arranged in a specific order to walk your audience through a narrative. Instead of static slides in a PowerPoint, each point in your story is a live, interactive visualization. This allows you to explain your findings step-by-step, highlighting key insights and revealing the context behind the numbers in a logical flow.

Before You Share: A Quick Final Checklist

Before you publish your work, a quick quality check can make a huge difference in how your story is received. Running through these five points ensures your audience has a smooth, insightful experience.

• Check Your Narrative Flow: Click through your story points from beginning to end. Does the sequence make logical sense? Are the captions and annotations on each point clear and concise? Make sure the narrative is easy to follow for someone seeing it for the first time.
• Review Interactivity: Test all your filters, highlights, and dashboard actions. Do they work as you intended? Misconfigured actions can confuse your audience and disrupt the flow of your narrative.
• Optimize Your Tooltips: Hover over the important marks in your charts. Are the tooltips providing useful, tidied-up information, or are they a jumble of default fields? Clean them up to only show relevant data that adds context.
• Check Performance: Is the story loading quickly? If it’s slow, consider hiding unused fields, creating data extracts, or simplifying complex calculations. A slow-loading workbook is one of the quickest ways to lose your audience's attention.
• Know Your Audience: A story built for a team of data analysts can be more complex than one for a C-level executive. Tailor the level of detail and jargon to your viewers. It's often a good practice to hide the individual worksheets that make up your story to avoid clutter and keep the focus on the main narrative.

Method 1: Share on Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud

For sharing within your organization, Tableau Server (self-hosted) and Tableau Cloud (Tableau-hosted, formerly Tableau Online) are the primary, most secure methods. They allow you to share interactive stories with colleagues while maintaining full control over who sees what.

Step-by-Step Publishing Instructions:

1. Open your completed workbook in Tableau Desktop.
2. Navigate to the top menu and select Server > Publish Workbook...
3. If you aren't already signed in, a dialog box will appear asking you to connect to your Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud instance.
4. Once connected, the Publish Workbook window will open. Here’s where you configure the details:
5. After setting your configurations, click the blue Publish button. Your story is now live and accessible via web browser to anyone with the proper permissions.

Method 2: Showcase Your Work with Tableau Public

If your story is meant for a wider audience - like a personal portfolio, a blog post, or a public data journalism piece - Tableau Public is the perfect free platform. One critical warning: anything published to Tableau Public is visible to everyone on the internet. Never use it for private, sensitive, or confidential company data.

Step-by-Step Publishing Instructions:

1. In Tableau Desktop, navigate to Server > Tableau Public > Save to Tableau Public...
2. You will be prompted to sign in to your Tableau Public account. If you don’t have one, you can create one for free.
3. Give your workbook a title. Tableau will show you a preview of the metadata that will be displayed.
4. Tableau Public requires data to be in an extract. If you are using a live connection, Tableau will automatically prompt you to create an extract first. This is a packaged, static copy of your data that gets uploaded with the viz.
5. Click Save. Tableau will publish the workbook to your public profile. When it’s done, a browser window will open, showing your live, interactive story on your account.

Sharing Your Public Story

Once published to Tableau Public, you'll see a 'Share' icon at the bottom of your visualization. Clicking it gives you two options:

• Shareable Link: A direct URL to your story that you can paste anywhere.
• Embed Code: An HTML snippet you can copy and paste into the backend of your website or blog to embed the interactive story directly into your content.

Method 3: Export Your Story as a Static File

Sometimes you don't need interactivity. You just need a static image or document to drop into a PowerPoint, a Word document, or an email. Tableau makes it easy to export your story in several common formats. Just note that these exports are snapshots - they lose all a viewer's ability to filter, hover for details, or click on data points.

Export as a PDF

This is great for creating printable reports or universally shareable documents.

1. Go to File > Print to PDF...
2. In the Print to PDF dialog box, configure your settings.
3. Click OK and save the file. The PDF will contain each story point as a separate page.

Export as a PowerPoint Presentation

This is arguably the fastest way to get your data story ready for a meeting. Tableau automates the process of turning your story into a slide deck.

1. Go to File > Export as PowerPoint...
2. Tableau will ask you to name and save the file.
3. When you open the saved file, you'll find a ready-made presentation. The workbook's title becomes the title slide, and each story point becomes its own slide, complete with its title and a static image of the visualization.

This method saves you the tedious work of taking individual screenshots and pasting them into slides, ensuring high-quality images that are perfectly formatted.

Choosing the Right Sharing Method

Not sure which path to take? Here’s a quick cheat sheet:

• Sharing with internal teams who need full interactivity and security? Publish to Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud.
• Showcasing your work in a public portfolio or on your blog? Publish to Tableau Public.
• Dropping your story into a business presentation or report? Export as a PowerPoint file.
• Creating a formal document or a printable handout? Export as a PDF.

Final Thoughts

Sharing your Tableau Story effectively is just as important as building it well. By choosing the right method - whether it’s publishing securely to an internal server, showcasing it on Tableau Public, or exporting a static PowerPoint - you can ensure your hard-earned insights reach your audience and make the impact they deserve.

Building detailed narratives in tools like Tableau is powerful, but often the time-consuming setup and steep learning curve can be a bottleneck. This is especially true when all you need are quick, clear answers from your data. At Graphed, we address this by connecting directly to your marketing and sales platforms - like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce - and letting you create dashboards and reports by simply describing what you want in plain English. This turns hours of manual report building into a 30-second task, allowing your entire team to get live, interactive insights without getting stuck in a complex BI tool.