Publish Data Sources and Workbooks
Suppose you create a view that exposes a new range of questions in the data you’re using, and you want to share this analysis with other people using this data. Or maybe you are your team’s Data Steward, in charge of building the data models approved for use by analysts, and meeting your organization’s requirements for security, compliance, performance, and so on.
You can share your work with the rest of your team by publishing it to Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud. After it’s published, you and your team can access it through your web browser or the Tableau mobile app. Publishing data sources can also help you to centralize data management.
In other resources
For the steps on how to publish, see the following topics:
Note: If you do not have Tableau Cloud or Server, you can share analysis on Tableau Public, a free cloud service. As the name suggests, views published to Tableau Public are publicly accessible. For more information, see public.tableau.com(Link opens in a new window).
Why publish
You can publish data sources and workbooks when you want to widen the audience for your data analysis within your organization. By publishing you can begin to do the following:
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Collaborate and share with others
Allow people in your organization to view, interact with, download, subscribe to, share, edit, and save published views, even if they do not use Tableau Desktop. Incorporate views into blog posts or websites.
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Centralize data and database driver management
Create and publish data models that everyone can use. Centralized data management allows for sharing a single source for your Tableau data. All workbooks connected to the published data reflect updates to it.
In addition, when you publish and connect to data on the server, people connecting to the data from Tableau Desktop do not need to install and maintain database drivers on their own computers.
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Support mobility
Access your data from a different computer or location, through a web browser or the Tableau Mobile iOS app. Sign in to your organization's Tableau Server from a private network offsite.
What you can publish
Content types you can publish include:
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Data sources: You can publish data sources that others can use to build new workbooks. A data source can contain a direct (or live) connection to your database or an extract you can refresh on a schedule.
For information, see Best Practices for Published Data Sources.
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Workbooks: Workbooks contain your views, dashboards, and stories, and data connection. You can include local resources, such as background images and custom geocoding, if they reside in a location that the server or other Tableau users cannot access.
Who can publish
To publish to Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud, your server or site administrator must grant you the following capabilities:
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A site role of Creator (formerly Publisher) on the site you're publishing to.
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View and Save capabilities set to Allowed on the project into which you publish.
If you use Tableau Desktop and are not sure whether you can publish to a server, or you are having trouble publishing, see your Tableau administrator. If you’re an administrator, see Content Access and Ownership(Link opens in a new window) in the Tableau Server help (or the Tableau Cloud version(Link opens in a new window)) for more information about site roles and permissions.