What is Tableau Public Desktop? First of all, Tableau Public is a place on the internet where you can publish your Tableau work to the world. Everything you do on Tableau Public is out there for the world to freely see. It’s perfect for those who are learning Tableau, but not good for internal company data, or anything that is private and confidential.

Typical Workflow

The rest of this post describes what Tableau Public Desktop is. However, once it is set up, and once you’ve created at least one viz, the workflow is simple:

1. Open Tableau Public Desktop on your computer
2. Click File, Open from Tableau Public…
3. Log in with credentials if not already logged in
4. Choose a visualization and click Open
5. Make changes as needed
6. File, Save to Tableau Public (or Save As)

The desktop refers the the fact that Tableau Public is also a downloadable app. It’s free. You can build your visualizations in the app and publish them to the public website. It is free and has limited functionality. For example, you cannot connect to all types of data sources. Below is the screenshot of Tableau Public Desktop on Windows 11. You can see that you can connect to Excel files, text files, JASON files, MS Access files, PDF files, and others.

Below is the screenshot of the About window of the app. It is updated frequently so you may need to download and reinstall the app a few times a year.

If you invest in Tableau Desktop there will be many many types of data you can connect to.

You need to create a Tableau Public account. When you do, you can create visualizations in Tableau Public. They will be stored on a public server for everyone to see. You can connect to those visualizations by clicking the link Open from Tableau Public. When you do that you will be asked to sign in, unless you have already signed in. Sign-ins do time out. Below is the sscreenshot of that sign in window.

Desktop

You can start a new project from your local computer by connecting to a local data source. If I connect to a local (on laptop) Excel file Sample – Superstore.xls, this is what I see. I have added the red marks for instruction.

I purchased the hard copy of the book Tableau Desktop Cookbook by Lorna Brown by O’Reilly Media Inc. The book uses the Superstore Excel file as the dataset, however, the Public version doesn’t allow for building the dataset the way she does in the first part of the book. Here below is a link to an Excel file I made so that you can get access to the data for the examples in the book. The file is about 1.5 GB.

OrderCustomerDetails.xlxs

Local file saving is available for all Tableau Desktop Public Edition users for free. With local save you can create and save visualizations on the go—no internet connection required. You will also benefit from a new auto-save feature.

First of all, Tableau Public is a free tool. It’s easy to get started with Tableau when you sign up for a free account. Note that all of your data and visualization are available to anyone who has access to the Internet. It’s wide open. If your working with confidential data, don’t save your work to Tableau Public. Tableau Public is a great place to get started with learning Tableau.

To create an account at Tableau Public, go to public.tableau.com.

Tableau Public could mean two things. It might mean the community website or the downloadable software. Regarding the software, we can download the Tableau Desktop Public edition (see screenshots below) for free and use this application on our computer. However, when you wish to save your work, you cannot save it locally, you must save it up on the public website (after you create an account). As long as your data is not confidential, this works fine. It’s a great way to learn and it’s what I do.

When you run the download for Tableau Desktop Public Edition for 2023.3, you’ll see something like the following screenshot. Click to enlarge it.

If you haven’t already done so, create an account online at Tableau Public. With the free Public version, all of your charts will be stored on the public (wide open for all eyes) website. If you are okay with that, go ahead.

Here’s an article called Tableau Desktop Vs Tableau Public from the Rigor Data Solutions website.

Learn with Books

There is a Tableau book called Tableau Desktop Cookbook by Lorna Brown published by O’Reilly in 2021. Below is a screenshot of my version (very slightly modified) of her exercise 3.7 shown in Tableau Public Desktop. Note that her book is not the Public version.

Learn with YouTube

Here is a short video called Tableau Public Data Visualization | Tableau Desktop For Free | Data Visualisation Software by Jellyman Education. This video is about 7 minutes long.