Publish a Data Source

Applies to: Tableau Desktop

When you are ready to make a data source available to other users, you can publish it to Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud. If the data source is in a workbook that you published to Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud, you can make it available by saving it, provided it’s an embedded Excel or text file. For details, see Publish a Data Source on the Web.

Note: If you haven't yet read about best practices for creating data sources and when to create an extract, see Best Practices for Published Data Sources.

General publishing steps

The following steps give an overview of the publishing workflow you will use regardless of the type of data or the server you publish to. Below these steps you can find supplemental information for authentication types and using Tableau Bridge.

  1. Select Server > Publish Data Source.

    If your workbook is connected to multiple data sources, select the one you want from the Publish Data Sources submenu.

  2. If you’re not already signed in to Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud, sign in now.

    How you sign in depends on how your administrator has set up your environment. For information, see Sign in to Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud.

  3. In the Publish Data Source dialog box, do the following:

    • For Project, select the project you want to publish to and enter the data source name.

    • For Description and Tags, add a description and tags that will help you and other users find it.

      Separate tags using either a comma or a space. To add a tag that contains a space, put it in quotation marks (e.g., “Sales Quotes”).

    • For Refresh Schedule, if publishing an extract, you have the option to select a refresh schedule to ensure that your extract data stays fresh. If you choose not to select a schedule here, you can select a schedule from Tableau Server after publishing.

      Note: This option is not available when publishing from the Data Source page or to Tableau Cloud.

    • For Permissions, accept the default project settings.

      Generally a site administrator manages permissions on the server. If you think your data source is an exception, work with your administrator to determine the best course of action, and see Set Permissions as You Publish a Data Source or Workbook.

    • For Authentication, if you need to provide credentials to access your data, you can specify how authentication should be handled when the data is published to the server.

      The options available for accessing the data source depend on the type of data you publish and whether you are publishing to Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud.

      Information appears at the bottom of the dialog box to let you know whether you need to take further action, such as adding Tableau Cloud to your data provider's authorized list.

      For information about the authentication types, see Set Credentials for Accessing Your Published Data.

  4. If you are publishing file-based data that is on a Windows mapped drive, or using images that will not be available from the server, select Include external files.

    When you include external files, copies of the files are put on the server as part of your data source. Copies of files are also put on the server and included as part of the data source when you publish extracts of multi-connection data sources that contain a connection to file-based data such as Excel. For more information about the implications of publishing extracts of multi-connection data sources, see Join Your Data

    If you do not want to publish the external files to the server, change the connection information so that the data source references a full UNC path. For example, rather than connecting to D:\datasource.xls, you would connect to \\filesrv\datasource.xls.

  5. By default, during the publishing process, Tableau updates the workbook connection to use the new published data source. It also closes the local data source.

    To continue using the local data source instead, clear the Update workbook to use the published data source check box.

    Note: If you select Undo after publishing the data source, Tableau will revert to using the local data source, but the data source will remain published. In addition, Tableau does not replace a local data source when you publish a cube (multidimensional) data source to Tableau Server. (Tableau Cloud does not support publishing cube data sources.)

  6. Click Publish.

    After publishing is complete, your web browser opens Ask Data for the data source, where you can ask questions to automatically create vizzes. For more information, see Automatically Build Views with Ask Data.

  7. (Optional) Set up a refresh schedule on the server. For more information, see the following topics:

Publish on-premises data (Tableau Cloud only)

To keep data sources that connect to on-premises data fresh after publishing to Tableau Cloud, Tableau Bridge is required. Tableau Cloud relies on Bridge to facilitate the connection between it and data accessible only from inside a private network.

As part of the publishing process, Tableau Cloud will automatically detect if Bridge is needed. If Bridge is needed, your publishing workflow might differ from the publishing process described above.

Refer to one of the following topics depending on the type of data source you’re publishing:

Publish with a Web Data Connector

To publish a web data connector data source, you need to import the web data connector to the server before you can set up a refresh schedule. You can do this only on Tableau Server.

You can refresh some web data connector data sources on Tableau Cloud, using Tableau Bridge.

For information, see Web Data Connectors in Tableau Server(Link opens in a new window) in the Tableau Server Help or Connectivity with Tableau Bridge(Link opens in a new window) in the Tableau Cloud Help.

Hidden fields in workbooks

Workbooks connected to a published data source respect the state of hidden fields in the published the data source.

  • If you create a new workbook that uses a published data source with hidden fields, those fields remain hidden in the workbook and cannot be used in calculations, sets, groups, and other object creation.

  • If you work with an existing workbook that uses a published data source with hidden fields, those hidden fields are displayed in red in the workbook to indicate that the fields, and therefore the views and calculations that use those fields, are invalid.

You can address this issue in one of the following ways:

  • Show (unhide) the relevant fields in the data source, and then republish the data source.

  • Update the relevant workbooks to exclude the hidden fields.

For information, see Hide or Unhide Fields.

See also

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