How to Share Workbook in Tableau Public

You’ve spent hours cleaning up your data, crafting the perfect calculations, and designing a stunning visualization in Tableau Desktop. Now, it's time to share your masterpiece with the world. This guide will walk you through exactly how to publish and share your workbook on Tableau Public, from pre-flight checks to embedding your viz on a website.

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First, A Quick Refresher: What is Tableau Public?

Before we get into the "how," let's quickly touch on the "what." Tableau Public is a free platform where you can create, share, and discover interactive data visualizations. Think of it like a GitHub or portfolio site specifically for data vizzes. It's an incredible resource for building a portfolio, participating in community projects like #MakeoverMonday, and demonstrating your data storytelling skills.

It's important to remember the key word here: public. Any workbook and its underlying data you upload to Tableau Public will be accessible to anyone on the internet. For this reason, it's perfect for personal projects, journalism, or analyses on public datasets, but not for sensitive or proprietary company information.

Before You Publish: A Quick Pre-Flight Checklist

Taking a few minutes to prepare your workbook before publishing can make a huge difference in how it's received. It’s like tidying up your house before guests arrive. Here’s a short checklist to run through.

1. Check Your Data Source Connection

Tableau Public works with data extracts (.hyper files) instead of live connections. When you publish your workbook, Tableau automatically creates an extract - a saved, static snapshot of your data at that moment. This means your dashboard won't automatically update if your underlying spreadsheet or file changes.

• Action: If you created an extract yourself (Right-click Data Source > Extract Data...), ensure it's refreshed with the latest data before you publish. This prevents you from sharing an outdated view.

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2. Clean Up Your Workbook

A polished workbook is easier for others to understand and explore. Remove any clutter that isn't essential for the final product.

• Sheet Names: Are your dashboards and worksheets descriptively named? Get rid of generic names like "Sheet 12 (copy)" and use titles that add context, like "Sales Trend by Region."
• Hide Unused Sheets: Your audience likely only needs to see the final dashboards, not the 15 individual worksheets you used to build them. Right-click the tab of any worksheet you want to hide and select Hide Sheet.
• Polish Your Tooltips: Hovering over data points is a key part of interacting with a viz. Make sure your tooltips are helpful and formatted cleanly. Click on the Tooltip card in the Marks pane to edit them. You can add more context, remove unneeded fields, and format the text to be more readable.

3. Double-Check for Sensitive Data

This is the most critical check. Since anyone can download your workbook and view the underlying data, you must ensure you aren’t sharing anything you shouldn't be.

• PII: Have you removed all Personally Identifiable Information (PII) like names, email addresses, phone numbers, or specific addresses?
• Proprietary Info: Does your data contain confidential company metrics, sales figures, or customer lists that shouldn't be public?
• Action: Before publishing, go to the Data Source tab and review every single column. If there's sensitive information, you'll either need to remove those columns from your source file or use a different, public-safe dataset.

4. Set Your Dashboard Dimensions

Think about where your viz will be viewed. On your Tableau Public profile? Embedded in a blog post? A larger portfolio site? Getting the size right will prevent awkward scrollbars or wasted space.

• Fixed Size: This gives you precise control over the layout (e.g., 1000px wide by 800px tall). This is often best for embedding in a blog post where you know the specific width of the content area.
• Automatic: The dashboard will resize to fit the screen it's being viewed on. This can be more flexible but sometimes leads to charts and objects shifting around in ways you didn't intend.

Step-by-Step: Publishing Your Workbook to Tableau Public

Once you’ve gone through the checklist, you’re ready to publish. The process itself is straightforward and all happens within the Tableau Desktop application.

Step 1: Save the Workbook Locally

It's always a good habit to save a local copy of your workbook first. Go to File > Save As... and save the .twbx file to your computer. This gives you a backup and a master copy you can always come back to.

Step 2: Sign In to Your Tableau Public Account

To publish, you need to be signed into your Tableau Public account from within Tableau Desktop.

• In the top menu, go to Server > Tableau Public > Sign In...
• A dialog box will appear asking for your Tableau Public email and password. Enter your credentials and click "Sign In."

Step 3: Save to Tableau Public

With your workbook open and your account connected, you’re ready for the main event.

• Go to the top menu and select Server > Tableau Public > Save to Tableau Public As...
• A saving dialog box will appear, asking you to give your workbook a title on Tableau Public.

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Step 4: Title Your Workbook and Click Save

Choose a clear and descriptive title for your workbook. Once you type in your title and hit the Save button, Tableau will begin the publishing process. It will create the data extract and upload the workbook to your public profile.

Note: If a workbook with the same name already exists on your profile, Tableau will ask if you want to overwrite it. This is how you update an already-published viz with new data or design changes.

After the upload completes, your default web browser will automatically open a new tab showing your shiny new visualization live on your Tableau Public profile. Congratulations!

Your Workbook is Live! Mastering the Sharing Options

Publishing your viz is just the beginning. The real value is in sharing it. On your Tableau Public workbook page, you'll see a 'Share' icon (a right-curving arrow) at the bottom of your visualization. Clicking this button opens up a world of possibilities.

The Direct Link: Easy and Universal

The first option you'll see is "Link." This is the direct URL to your workbook's page on Tableau Public. You can copy this link and paste it anywhere: in an email, a Slack message, a social media post, or on your resume.

Embedding in Your Website or Blog

This is arguably the most powerful feature. Embedding places your live, interactive Tableau viz directly within your own website, portfolio, or blog post. Viewers can interact with it without ever leaving your site.

1. Click the 'Share' icon on your Tableau viz.
2. Copy the code from the "Embed Code" box. It will look something like this:

<div class='tableauPlaceholder' id='viz1678886400000' style='position: relative'><object class='tableauViz' style='display:none,'><param name='host_url' value='https%3A%2F%2Fpublic.tableau.com%2F' /> ... </object></div>

Paste this HTML code directly into the source code of your webpage. Most modern website builders (like WordPress, Squarespace, or Webflow) have an "Embed" or "HTML" block where you can drop this code in.

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Pro-Tip: Customizing the Embed

You can even customize the embed features. Right below the embed code, you'll see options to toggle the toolbar (e.g., to hide the download or full-screen buttons) or change dimensions. Making a change here will automatically update the embed code for you to copy.

Sharing a Custom View

Imagine you have a big dashboard showing sales data for every state, but you want to send your colleague in California a link that starts with the California filter already applied. This is a custom view.

1. Interact with your published dashboard. Use a filter, select a particular region on a map, or drill down into a category.
2. Once you have the view exactly as you want it, go back to the toolbar and click the "View" icon (it looks like a set of binoculars).
3. Give your custom view a name (like "California Only View") and save it.
4. Now, when you go to the Share menu, you can share the link directly to that custom view you just saved. The filters will already be applied when someone opens the link.

Final Thoughts

Publishing your work on Tableau Public is a fantastic way to build a professional portfolio, engage with the data community, and turn your analytical work into a shareable asset. From the initial data checks to mastering the embed options, following these steps will ensure your work is presented professionally and reaches the audience it deserves.

Building beautiful dashboards in tools like Tableau is a powerful skill, but the entire process - from connecting data sources to cleaning the data and then configuring each visualization - can be incredibly time-consuming. We believe getting insights shouldn't require spending hours clicking through menus. That's why we built Graphed. We wanted a way to simply connect all our data and get answers in seconds, not hours. By using conversational language to build dashboards and ask follow-up questions, we turn complex analysis into a real-time conversation, freeing you up to focus on strategy instead of struggling with report setup.