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