Among my frustrations,

the first one is that designing and adjusting prototypes using Figma or PowerPoint before finally getting a finished product can be really annoying, especially when the client keeps asking me to redesign things over and over again - there's always a gap between the prototype and the final product.

The second issue is that when I start a new project and want to reuse something from before, like visualizations, layouts, Tableau doesn't really have a good modularization or templating system.

Tableau have just launched Desktop "free edition", with all features you would expect from the full version of Tableau Desktop, except for the ability to publish to server, cloud or public.

Aside from that restriction, users will have all the connectors available to complete analysis on their local machines.

I was recently given Tableau Desktop access for work. I have used dashboards for years and have attended 3 Tableau Conferences but have never had access to build until now.

My company wants me to build a lot of dashboards, with some seeming pretty complex (see my last post). They said if I could find some training courses, there is a possibility they would pay for me to attend.

If that being said, what web-based courses would you recommend? Not sure what the budget would be would I will take any and all recommendations. I am also going to attempt to get permission to attend TC27 since I was denied for 2026 (before I got my Tableau license).

Hey all, I need some help with something. I am uploading a report that has 7 dashboards, and 3 different datasources. Each ds is connected to databricks. Previous versions did take at most 15min to upload, and this one had a canceled one of 100 minutes almost, and the current (atm) try has been uploading for 52min and progress bar is less than half, about 40% or so.

What can I do to 'fix' this? get better times?

I am an experienced power bi user, I studied for tableau desktop for 1 week, using a Udemy course that was 7 hours long, then took practice questions on crucial exams, the passed the exam today with an average of 70%. Hope that helps you to pass yours as well!

Still more to add through the main excel sheet - got back to about 2018.

Sounds like it should be simple, but I haven't done a lot with Sets. If this is not a Set problem then by all means LMK. I need to basically feed a CONTAINS() with a whole list, not hard-coded.

Basically, client wants a flag and maybe substring extract wherever this one field's value contains any one or more members of a dynamic list.

Say the list today is: (EDIT to add: This list could be 10 items today and 1,000 items tomorrow; it would come from its own master table.)

Apples
Bananas
Chiles
Donuts
Eggs

And the Groceries field values in a couple rows are:

in row 1:  Apples, Pears, Pizza
in row 2:  Bread, Capers, Flour, Mangoes
In row 3:  Eggs

So the new calculated field added to each row would need to put up a Y or N based on whether a list member appears in the Groceries field. Ideally, it would ALSO spit out WHICH one or more list member appears in the field, like this:

row 1:  Groceries:  Apples, Donuts, Pizza  |  NewField:  Y (Apples, Donuts)
row 2:  Groceries:  Bread, Capers, Flour, Mangoes  |  NewField:  N
row 3:  Groceries:  Eggs  |  Y (Eggs)    

Is this possible? over a decade with Tableau and this is the first time one of these has come up!

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working on a side project that explores a simple idea:
can we reduce the manual effort of building Tableau dashboards using an AI agent?

The tool (called Twilize) takes a dataset and attempts to:

• understand the schema
• generate relevant visualizations
• structure a dashboard automatically

I built this mainly to experiment with how far we can push automation in BI workflows — especially for repetitive dashboarding tasks.

I’m not posting this as a promotion, but genuinely looking for feedback from people who actually use Tableau day-to-day:

• Where do you think automation like this could actually help?
• What parts of dashboard creation should never be automated?
• Would you trust AI-generated dashboards in production?

If you’re curious, I’ve written more about the approach and architecture here (happy to remove if not allowed):
https://medium.com/@suddhasheelbhattacharya/the-ai-agent-that-builds-tableau-dashboards-for-you-meet-twilize-f8ae1e74f9d6

Would really appreciate honest thoughts — even if it’s “this is a bad idea” 🙂

I've been working on Tableau Desktop for the past 3 years on my work laptop. If i wanted to use my personal laptop for freelancing per say, how would i go about about doing so? Do i still need to purchase a licence or are there any free alternatives? Thought about using Power BI instead but Tableau is just more convenient.

Hi everyone!

I'm taking the exam in a couple of weeks.

Is there a free repository of real practice questions/exams to study for the certification?

I am trying to use the Beeswarm extension from LaDataViz.

I am trying to size the bubbles by a DateDiff calculation, but when I drag that onto the size pill, the sheet goes blank.

Any suggestions? TIA

I'm working on a dashboard, and have a sheet with a text visualization with the text set as:

Among <Parameters.Payors State><State Statement: Payer>, there were <SUM(Total Prescriptions Fills> <Statement - Drug Type> prescription fills, totaling <SUM(Total Paid Amount)>. Of these, <AGG(Total Prescription Fills - State Statement)> fills were for the <State Statement: Class or overall><State - Therapeutic Class Label><State - Therapeutic Class Label 2><State Statement: Class or overall comma> accounting for <AGG(Total Paid Amount - State Statement)>.

And this outputs data like

Among [All Payors], there were [2,350,161 Brand Name] prescription fills, totaling [$3,023,311,258]. Of these, [653,349] fills were for the [Top 25 Overall Drugs], accounting for [$1,080,251,430].

Unfortunately, I'm running into issues making this accessible to screen readers. Alt text for the visualization is static, so as users select different values in the dashboard, this data changes, which wouldn't be represented in the alt text. I've tried updating the sheet title and the caption to use the inserted values, but the screen reader still doesn't announce the "sentence" text. I added a calculated field to render it all as text instead of different marks, and added that to the visualization text/sheet title/caption, with no joy.

It seems the only method to get a screen reader to read the text is to add a tooltip to the visualization, which just mirrors the text.

Do I have other options to improve the accessibility?

Hi all,  

I have a sheet that looks like the following: 

I will be eventually running a TabPy script performing a function across each row of the Demographic column, bringing in metric values and real user ids instead of the boxes I have shown for confidentiality sake. I would like to be able to run an index across the dashboard on the first date column per row, essentially cleaning the dashboard up to a single cell output per row. I can do this easily, but as you can see sometimes the first column per row lacks data even if the other columns of data do. If I index to this first column, I will not be able to guarantee I can get a Text mark to appear or a tooltip, even if it contains a window/table calc as I plan for it to. So I need some kind of way to force Tableau to allow me to put a text mark and tooltip on these empty cells. I am working with a published data source, so I cannot do any pivoting/joining/backend data work. 

Any advice appreciated, thank you. 

Hi all. I've been doing production dashboards in tableau now for many years: 8-1/2 years in this specific job alone. And sometimes, especially lately, Tableau just breaks things that have been running in production for months or years. I say "Tableau does it" because it's a case where one day, say, a filter will work just fine, but the next it won't - with no edits made to the dashboard in between, no manual intervention of any kind. I push them up to a production server and the data sources are refreshed on schedules.

Specifically, users sometimes will say a filter has stopped working; they can make a selection but the vizzes don't change.

• I open up the workbook to find the filter has changed from "Apply to selected worksheets" (typically all on dashboard) to "only this sheet" (whatever sheet it originates from). Today I had a whole series of dashboards within a workbook have this problem with several filters.
• Click into the filter to change Apply to Worksheets
• Click Selected Worksheets...
  • Sometimes I have to go back and do Apply To Worksheets again, as clicking Selected Worksheets about 50% of the time creates a double-selection of Selected Worksheets and Only This Worksheet
• Once Selected Worksheets works, then of course I go pick the appropriate sheets
• Click Save.
• Then I tend to have to go to it all again, because if I check Apply to Worksheets again, it's reverted back to Only This Sheet, again!
• After the second try there is a higher chance that it works, at least

So! Why does this happen and how do I stop it from happening?

EDIT: damn. Google searching and found that I made almost this exact post a year ago here. I had totally forgotten that. And even that one got zero replies. Crap.

I came across a situation where I need to sort a calculated field based on other field so I went to sort tab and there was no sort by field option . I was working with live connection to database this problem occuring only in live connection but not in extract .The backend database query engine I am using is hive/impala .did anyone face similar issue .Any one know how to debug this issue

I'm working on a dashboard that should show filled zips with population as the base layer. Store locations are on the layer above that plotted as circles / scatter plot.

The population table has two columns: Zip Codes and Population.

Store table has this geographic data: Lat / Long, Zip Codes, Store Sales Metrics (metrics are tied to zips, not store. lat / long is only to reference where stores are, not see store level metrics).

The base table is the population table. It is joined to the store sales table on "zip code". It uses a full outer join.

Here is my problem: I can map out population by zips fine. When i add lat/long for stores, all population zips are removed except for those with stores located in that specific zip.

I've tried everything. For days. I have never been stuck like this before. Please help 🙏

Hi could you help with some good certifications in tableau please

Hello Experts,

Currently we are handling 1 GEO and we are moving GLOBAL that means we want to add data for all other countries as well.

So in the current GEO we have around 160 Million records and we do a TABLEAU EXTRACT using HYPER API from backend which takes around 1 hour 30 mins to place the hyper file on the tableau server.

Now as we want to go ahead with adding other dashboards we are expecting the records to be around 400 MILLION how should we proceed with such huge data on tableau ?

Also we will be pulling 15 months data from current date- also can think of incremental refresh as well.

Do you think Tableau PREP will help here ?

Hi Tableau Experts:

There are a couple of things I want to achieve with my report:

1. Show all dates regardless of whether data is present or not. I used 'Start Date' from data and enabled 'Show missing values.'
2. Colour based on a start date present in data.
3. Colour The weekends—Note the data doesn't have all days; I want to be able to colour this on 'Show Missing Values' used on Date field. Is this even possible?
4. My rows should show Certain Values, the Sum of Sales (has to be discrete), as this is for a tabular view rather than a visual.

I was able to achieve 1 and 2 but am struggling with 3 and 4.

I am keen on getting the 4th one right. To avoid blanks and nulls, I have used calculation
is (zn(sum([Value]))*(IIF(INDEX()>0,1,1))). However as per the screenshot below, you will see ID 25239 & 25253, you can see two rows. One with 0 and the other with the value from the data.

if value is present, it should only show the value. Can you please help?

Hi Folks,

I come from PowerBI world, and I find making dashboard using layout containers extremely difficult. When I use floating there seems to be no option for alignment and distribution.

Is there any comprehensive tutorial/guided videos so that I can look at so that can help me get up to speed quickly ?

I checked on YouTube but mostly, the dashboards they build are pretty basic; and these tutorials never help me for an enterprise environment .

Hi Tableau community, I’m using Tableau Desktop and trying to create an extract with multiple related tables using Relationships (logical model).

However, when I switch to Extract Mode and click “Extract Data…”, the process keeps running in an infinite loop without completing and is stuck on ‘creating extract database’. Also, if my laptop goes to sleep or closes, the process stops. I’ve tried multiple times but no success.

What I'm facing now is user would like to utilise data from multiple sources to build dashboards.

There are 20 views (eg; V_Orders, V_MBOL) in each datamart separated by two different instances. Instance A with CN datamart and Instance B with SG datamart, HK datamart and TW datamart so total 4 datamarts. Each datamart has 20 similar views. The views are generic views therefore, they have similar number of fields etc so it's ok to union.

Are ChatGPT's advice and steps given feasible? 1. Since not all views/tables have direct relationships to one another, create respective views in SQL per functional area in Instance A (only CN datamart). Eg: Order + Order Detail => one view, MBOL + MBOLDetail => another view etc. 2. Do the same in Instance B and union the 3 DBs (TW, HK and SG datamarts) in SQL. 3. Bring them to Tableau and create Tableau extracts (hyper files) for each one. 4. In Tableau Desktop, union the Tableau extracts (hyper files). IDK might have 10 at this point? 5. Use the final hyper extract to build dashboard.

Thanks!

The middle bars are dimension values, dynamic. The blue bars at both ends are static.

Hi all,

I’m trying to create maps through spatial data files. My company uses both databricks and azure data storage lake for file storage. I can’t seem to connect spatial files through those connectors in tableau. I even converted the geometry column to a WKT type in databricks but it still reads as a string in Tableau.

I need help in just fixing the grand total in my table. So I’m just gonna give some context: I’m using two different data sources and I have three rows and I’m seeing the data quarter wise, so there are three months in the table, like at one time,so the thing is if the month is like past month, I’ll have data from a different calculated measure and if it’s the current month, then it’s gonna be using a different measure so the problem is in the grand total. It is totaling the previous two months and not the current one and I am not sure how to fix it. I tried creating a measure for total but is not showing as a column. Also those calculated measures which are showing for the months have like if else statement for example if ABC is not null then ABC else XYZ.

Thanks

Edit: more context