Turn off Automatic Updates to Boost Performance

When you place a field on a shelf, Tableau generates the resulting view by querying the data source. When you create a complex data view that involves many fields, these queries can be time-consuming. To improve performance, you can turn off automatic updates while composing a view, and then query the data source when you're done.

Automatic updates for worksheets

To turn off updates for worksheets, click the Pause Auto Updates button on the toolbar. You can also toggle automatic updates on and off by pressing F10 (Option-Command-0 on a Mac) on your keyboard.

While automatic updates are off, you can update the view at any time by clicking the Run Update button on the toolbar, or by pressing F9 (Shift-Command-0 on a Mac).

Identifying invalid states when automatic updates are off

It's possible to enter an invalid state when automatic updates are turned off. When this happens, the view is desaturated and invalid commands are disabled. The view and commands become available again when you click Run Update on the toolbar.

For example, the view below has automatic updates turned off. When we changed the aggregation for Profit from a summation to an average, the view became desaturated to indicate that the current view is invalid.

Automatic updates for filters

When you change a filter, even when you turn off automatic updates for worksheets, Tableau continues to query the data source to update the view. When you work with a large data set, this continuous query action can degrade performance, so Tableau also gives you an option to pause automatic updates for filters. If you pause automatic updates for filters, you can make as many changes as you need without having to wait for Tableau to update the filter each time.

To pause automatic updates for filters, click the drop-down arrow on the Pause Auto Updates button on the toolbar and select Auto Update Filters to clear the check mark .

To resume automatic updates for filters, click the drop-down arrow on the Pause Auto Updates button on the toolbar and select Auto Update Filters again. You can also click the Run Update button on the toolbar to manually update the view at any time.

How Automatic Updates Affect Dashboards and Stories

You configure automatic updates on a per-view basis. This means that you can have a dashboard where some views update automatically, and others don't. Similarly, you can have a story where some story points update automatically, and others don't. But when dashboards or stories are published to Tableau Server, automatic updates affect either none of the contributing views in a story or dashboard, or all of the views.

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