Tableau Public is a free platform to publicly share and explore data visualizations online. With Tableau Public, all of your saved visualizations are out there on the internet for all to see, so if your are working with confidential data, don’t publish to Tableau Public. If you are just learning using public datasets, it’s perfect.

How do you sign up for Tableau Public and set up your profile? In the browser navigate to public.tableau.com. You can create your account by clicking on the Sign Up button in the top-right corner of the screen. A pop up dialog box will appear asking you for basic profile information. Enter the requested information and click on Create My Profile once the button becomes available.

Visualizations in Tableau are dynamic, not static, meaning that they are interactive or change with time. The interactive nature of these graphics means your audience has some control over what they see and you have flexibility with how you create them.

Once you have an account you can start by exploring datasets and other people’s creations.

Links in Tableau Public

Here are a few links within Tableau Public. Clicking on these links will take you to those sections of Tableau.

• Public Gallery: These are data visualizations created by other users that you can look at
• Viz of the Day: Tableau Public has a new data viz every day.
• Tableau Public Resources page: This links to the resources page, including some how-to videos and sample data. The link takes you to the videos but you can click on Sample Data to see those.
• Tableau User Forum: Search for answers and connect with other users in the community.

After you sign in to your Tableau Public account, you can look for a data viz that interest you. Google Career Certificates has some sample datasets that are for beginners. If you click that link just mentioned, it opens a new tab still linked to your account. You can save these to your own profile. Click on one that you like. There is one called Just the Data – World Happiness. If you click Make a Copy in the upper right corner you can save it to your own profile so that you can start making visualizations. Excellent. You should see something like the screenshot below, if you are following along.

The next thing is to create a new worksheet to be able to create a viz from scratch.

• Workbooks published on the Tableau public server are accessible by anyone on the Internet. No user level security in the Tableau public server.
• Tableau Public limits you to only locally available data sources like Excel, Text files, TDE (Tableau data extract), and Access.
• Tableau Public only saves workbooks in the Tableau public server; now (new feature) you can save workbooks locally on your computer!
• Tableau Public has a limit of 10 million data rows allowed in any single connection.
• Each of account holder will be able to save up to 10 gigabytes (GB) of content to Tableau Public

As a best practice, you should save any datasets you’re working with to the data sources folder. Keeping your data files in one place is a best practice that will keep you organized.

Saving Your Work to Tableau Public

With your workbook open in Tableau Desktop Professional or Tableau Public Edition, select Server > Tableau > Save to Tableau Public. This option is available only if you’ve created a visualization with at least one field (column). Sign in using your Tableau Public account. If you have no account, create one. Type a name for the workbook and click Save. Use a descriptive unique title that others will be able to find.

With Tableau Desktop Public Edition you can save your work locally. You do not have to save to the public server so that others may see it.