How to Use Tableau Public

Creating compelling data visualizations completely for free sounds too good to be true, but that's exactly what Tableau Public offers. If you want to build a portfolio, learn a powerful new skill, or simply make better sense of your data, Tableau Public is an incredible place to start. This guide will walk you through the essential first steps, from downloading the software and connecting your data to building and sharing your very first interactive dashboard.

What Exactly is Tableau Public?

Tableau Public is the free version of Tableau Desktop, one of the most popular and powerful business intelligence tools in the world. It's designed for anyone who wants to learn data visualization, build public-facing dashboards, or create a portfolio of their work. You can create fully interactive charts, maps, and dashboards and share them with the world.

The key difference - and it's a big one - is how you save your work. Unlike the paid versions where you can save files locally and privately, anything you create with Tableau Public must be saved to the Tableau Public server. This means your dashboard and the underlying data become publicly visible. It's perfect for working with public datasets, like sports stats or government data, but it's absolutely not the place for confidential or sensitive business information.

Key Features and Limitations:

• Free to Use: Download and use the full visualization capabilities without any cost.
• Broad Data Connections (for files): You can connect to a variety of local file types, including Microsoft Excel, text files (like CSVs), JSON files, spatial files, and statistical files.
• Public Sharing: Your saved work is hosted on your public Tableau profile, creating an online portfolio you can share via a link.
• Data Security Note: Because all workbooks are public, you cannot use it for private company data.
• No Direct Database Connections: Unlike paid versions, you can't connect directly to cloud databases like Amazon Redshift or Snowflake. You need to use file exports from those sources.

Getting Set Up: Download and Installation

Getting Tableau Public up and running on your machine only takes a few minutes. It's a straightforward process for both Windows and Mac users.

1. Visit the official Tableau Public download page.
2. Enter your email address and click the "Download the App" button.
3. The download for your operating system (Windows .exe or Mac .dmg) will begin automatically.
4. Once the download is complete, open the installer file.
5. Follow the on-screen instructions, accepting the terms and conditions, to complete the installation.

That's it! Once installed, you can open the application and move on to the fun part: connecting to your data.

Connecting to Your Data Source

When you first open Tableau Public, you'll see a start screen. On the left side is the Connect pane, which lists all the types of data sources you can work with. For Tableau Public, this is focused on local files.

Let's walk through connecting a simple Excel file. For this example, you can use a common sample dataset like the "Superstore" dataset (often used in Tableau tutorials), or any Excel or CSV file of your own with clear column headers.

1. In the Connect pane, click on Microsoft Excel.
2. A file browser window will open. Navigate to where you saved your Excel file, select it, and click Open.
3. Tableau will now take you to the Data Source page. Here, you'll see a list of sheets from your Excel file on the left. Drag the sheet you want to analyze into the main canvas area that says "Drag sheets here."
4. Once you drag a sheet over, Tableau displays a preview of your data in a familiar table format at the bottom. You can see your column headers and the first few hundred rows of data.

Tableau is smart enough to often correctly identify the data type for each column (e.g., number, string, date). If it gets one wrong, you can click the data type icon above the column header (like # for number or Abc for string) to manually change it.

Navigating the Tableau Workspace

After you've connected to your data, click on the "Sheet 1" tab at the bottom left to open the main workspace. This is where you'll build your visualizations, or "vizzes" as they're known in the Tableau community. The screen might look intimidating at first, but it's actually quite logical.

The Core Components:

• Data Pane (Top Left): This is where Tableau lists all the columns from your data source. It automatically separates them into two categories:
• Shelves (Top): This section contains the Columns and Rows shelves. This is the heart of building a viz. You will drag your dimensions and measures here to structure your chart. For a bar chart, you might put a dimension on Columns and a measure on Rows.
• Canvas (Center): This large open space is where your visualization appears as you build it.
• Marks Card (Left of Canvas): This powerful card controls the visual properties of your data points (the "marks"). You can drag fields here to control:
• Show Me (Top Right): This is a handy helper for beginners. You can select a few fields from your data pane, and Show Me will highlight the types of charts you can build. It's a quick way to see possibilities, though you'll gain more control by building manually.

Step-by-Step: Creating Your First Bar Chart

Let's put this into practice by building a classic bar chart: sales by product category. This is one of the most common and useful visualizations you can make.

1. Get Your Fields Ready: In the Data Pane, locate your categorical field (e.g., "Sub-Category") and your numerical field (e.g., "Sales").
2. Create the Chart Structure: Drag the "Sub-Category" dimension from the Data Pane and drop it onto the Columns Shelf. Then, drag the "Sales" measure and drop it onto the Rows Shelf.
3. Voilà! Tableau instantly generates a vertical bar chart. Each bar represents a sub-category, and its height corresponds to its total sales.
4. Add Labels For Clarity: To see the exact sales number on each bar, drag the "Sales" measure again, but this time, drop it onto the Label box in the Marks Card.
5. Introduce Color: Let's make the chart more insightful by coloring the bars based on profit. Drag the "Profit" measure and drop it on the Color box in the Marks Card. The bars will now be color-coded based on how profitable each category is, with a legend appearing on the right.
6. Sort Your Data: To easily see the top-performing categories, find the small sort icon at the bottom of the "Sales" axis in your chart or hover over the "Sub-Category" pill in your Columns shelf and click the icon there to sort in descending order.
7. Name Your Worksheet: At the very bottom, double-click on the "Sheet 1" tab and rename it to something descriptive, like "Sales by Sub-Category".

Congratulations, you've just built your first interactive visualization!

Building an Interactive Dashboard

A dashboard is where you bring multiple visualizations together on a single screen to tell a cohesive story. This is where Tableau truly shines.

1. First, create another simple visual on a new sheet. For example, create a map showing sales by state by dragging "State" to the canvas (Tableau will recognize it as a geographic field) and "Sales" to the Color mark. Name this sheet "Sales Map."
2. Create a New Dashboard: At the bottom of the screen, next to your named worksheet tabs, click the icon for "New Dashboard" (it looks like a small grid).
3. Arranging Your Vizzes: On the left side of the dashboard view, you'll see a list of your worksheets. Simply drag "Sales by Sub-Category" and "Sales Map" onto the blank dashboard canvas. Tableau will automatically tile them to fit the space.
4. Adding Interactivity: This is the magic part. Select the map worksheet on your dashboard. You'll see a gray border appear around it with a few icons at the top right. Click the "Use as Filter" funnel icon.
5. Now, click on a specific state on your map. Watch as your bar chart instantly updates to show the sales for sub-categories only in that state. This simple click allows users to explore the data dynamically.

Saving and Sharing Your Work

Now that you've built a dashboard, it's time to share it with the world. Remember, saving in Tableau Public means publishing it online.

1. Go to the top menu and select File > Save to Tableau Public As...
2. A login window for your Tableau Public account will appear. If you don't have an account, you can create one for free. Sign in.
3. Give your workbook a name, like "My First Sales Dashboard." Tableau will take a moment to publish it.
4. Once it's done, your dashboard will automatically open in your web browser. It's now live! You can share the browser URL with anyone, embed it on your website, or add it to your LinkedIn profile.

Final Thoughts

By following these steps, you've gone from installing the software to connecting your own data, building distinct visualizations, combining them into an interactive dashboard, and publishing it for anyone to see. Tableau Public is your gateway to the world of data analytics, offering an incredibly powerful tool for anyone willing to learn how to use it.

Of course, mastering a tool like Tableau takes time and practice. But the learning curve can be steep when you're just trying to get quick performance reports for your marketing campaigns or sales team. We created Graphed to solve this by skipping the learning curve entirely. Instead of dragging and dropping fields, you just connect your platforms like Google Analytics, Shopify, or Salesforce once and then create entire dashboards and reports in seconds simply by describing what you want to see in plain English.