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Tableau Public

Tableau Public

Overview

What is Tableau Public?

Tableau Public is a free edition of the Desktop product. With this edition, data can only be published to the Tableau public website and does not allow work to be saved or exported locally.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Tableau Public has found its place in a variety of use cases, proving to be a versatile tool for data analysis and visualization. Analysts …
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Popular Features

View all 15 features
  • Customizable dashboards (12)
    10.0
    100%
  • Drill-down analysis (12)
    9.8
    98%
  • Report Formatting Templates (12)
    9.7
    97%
  • Formatting capabilities (12)
    9.7
    97%
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Pricing

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What is Tableau Public?

Tableau Public is a free edition of the Desktop product. With this edition, data can only be published to the Tableau public website and does not allow work to be saved or exported locally.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Alternatives Pricing

What is Tableau Desktop?

Tableau Desktop is a data visualization product from Tableau. It connects to a variety of data sources for combining disparate data sources without coding. It provides tools for discovering patterns and insights, data calculations, forecasts, and statistical summaries and visual storytelling.

N/A
Unavailable
What is QlikView?

QlikView® is Qlik®’s original BI offering designed primarily for shared business intelligence reports and data visualizations. It offers guided exploration and discovery, collaborative analytics for sharing insight, and agile development and deployment.

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Product Demos

Tableau Online Training and Tableau Demo , Tableau Real Time project & Tableau Certification

YouTube

How to Visualize a Government Budget using Tableau Public.

YouTube

Tableau Demo: Tableau Training for Beginners | Data Visualisation using Tableau Video(2018) | ExcelR

YouTube

ERP Demo: Parteneriatul Tableau Software - Senior Software in Romania

YouTube
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Features

BI Standard Reporting

Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.

9.8
Avg 8.4

Ad-hoc Reporting

Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.

9.7
Avg 8.0

Report Output and Scheduling

Ability to schedule and manager report output.

9.5
Avg 8.4

Data Discovery and Visualization

Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for patterns and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.

9.7
Avg 8.2
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Product Details

What is Tableau Public?

Tableau Public Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Tableau Public is a free edition of the Desktop product. With this edition, data can only be published to the Tableau public website and does not allow work to be saved or exported locally.

Tableau Public starts at $0.

Reviewers rate Customizable dashboards and Publish to Web and Publish to PDF highest, with a score of 10.

The most common users of Tableau Public are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(288)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Tableau Public has found its place in a variety of use cases, proving to be a versatile tool for data analysis and visualization. Analysts rely on Tableau Public to gather requirements and build customized dashboards that meet their specifications. With the ability to visualize and present large datasets, Tableau Public enables users to summarize data and identify trends using various visualizations. This makes it an invaluable asset for organizations, allowing them to make sense of complex data sets and generate insights that aid in quick decision-making. Its capabilities extend beyond internal use, as Tableau Public also serves as a platform for creating publicly-available data dashboards and visualizations. The tool enables organizations to publish and distribute these visuals, whether through embedding them on their own websites or sharing them with other organizations. Furthermore, students leverage Tableau Public for educational purposes such as data analysis projects and research, while agencies utilize it both internally and for client reporting and dashboarding. Personal users have also found value in Tableau Public, using it to create and share dashboards with others. Ultimately, Tableau Public offers a wide range of applications across industries and user types, making it an indispensable tool for anyone seeking to unlock insights from data.

Great training tool: Many users have found Tableau Public to be a valuable training tool for understanding the basics of Tableau before purchasing the full software. This has allowed them to familiarize themselves with the platform and its features, making it easier for them to transition to using the complete version effectively.

Extends visualization capabilities: Reviewers have praised Tableau Public as an excellent tool for extending the visualization capabilities of Excel. They appreciate how it enables them to create more advanced and interactive visualizations, allowing them to present data in a more engaging and accessible way. Additionally, Tableau Public's ability to publish data for others to access has been highly valued by users.

User-friendly interface with easy customization: Users have consistently highlighted Tableau Public's user-friendly interface, which makes it simple and intuitive to create and reformat visualizations. The availability of various visualization wizards has also been mind-blowing according to reviewers, enabling users to easily explore relationships between variables and present findings effectively. Furthermore, users appreciate the customization capabilities offered by Tableau Public, allowing non-developers to make on-the-go changes and tailor their visualizations without difficulty.

Limited data sharing and security options: Several users have expressed the need for better options for public sharing of visualizations and data, as well as concerns about the lack of security in Tableau Public. Some reviewers feel that the fact that any data used in the program is public and not secure is a significant drawback.

Restrictive storage space limitation: A common concern among users is the 1 GB storage space limitation per user ID and password. This constraint is seen as limiting by several reviewers, especially for those who work with large volumes of data.

Limitations in data ingestion and compatibility: Many users have mentioned the limitations in terms of data ingestion in Tableau Public. The software only allows a maximum of 10 million rows per data source and does not support direct connections to SQL databases. Additionally, some users have found it unable to read Excel workbooks with multiple pages, which can be restrictive when working with complex datasets.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-14 of 14)
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Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Tableau Public as part of our reporting and dashboarding toolset within our agency's marketing team. We use it both for internal and client dashboards and find it is a pretty helpful and wide-ranging dashboarding and data visualization tool, the fact that it is free is only an added bonus despite the limitations of the free account.
  • Data visualisation
  • Sharing visualisations
  • Importing data from Multiple sources, both online and local data
  • Creating Dashboards
  • Pre built visualisations
  • Data sharing
  • Haven't seen any as it currently meets all of our requirements and expectations for a free tool
Tableau Public is a great data visualization tool for its price and the functionality it offers you when it comes to creating and maintaining dashboards. Compared to the other tools we had used, with Tableau we were able to process larger datasets. The community visualizations also help save time when building new dashboards.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I use Tableau Public for my personal use, its easy to create dashboards and share them with everyone who would like to see new visuals and some workaround hacks to achieve desired visual. if we are using public data it's easy to publish in Tableau public as there won't be any data restrictions. Tableau public has a lot of make-overs Monday dashboards for more ideas and suggestions from people across the world.
  • Sharing Dashboards with public.
  • All feature like desktop.
  • No data restrictions and safe to share.
  • Version controlling.
  • Better URL to share with people.
  • Create a snapshot video option is good to have.
Tableau public is the best platform to build dashboards for your personal profile and share with recruiters. It's always good to keep ourselves updated on the latest features, create sample dashboards and save them to a personal profile. Tableau public is free and doesn't need any subscription. anyone can create an account and start building reports.
Suryaprakash Mishra | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I used Tableau Public to develop the visualization using road safety data to transform data into insights in a public space.
  • Easy to use
  • Many visuals to use and have variety
  • Highly secure
  • Very popular
  • Overlaying of the number maps
Input files - connects to mostly all input types including SAS, SPSS, and R.Regular enhancements, improvements, and upgrades. There are a number of features that are easy for common people to understand and use the information. Easy data management techniques, dynamic headers, and an option to create tab as well as dashboard.


Christopher Penn | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Tableau Public is used within our organization to make publicly-available data dashboards and visualizations for public consumption. We do internal data analysis and then publish to Tableau Public's servers; additionally, we'll use its sharing features to distribute our visualizations to other organizations, as well as embed the visualizations on our own content on our site and publication sites we work with.
  • Free
  • Integrated with Tableau Desktop
  • Easy to use visualizations
  • User friendly for the consumer
  • Tableau Public could use a bit of access control
  • Integration with Google Analytics would be nice
Tableau Public is ideal for sharing any visualization that is intended for the public. It is inappropriate for use with any proprietary or confidential data.
Hiren Mistry | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Tableau is being used to make sense of the plethora of data to CxO team and bank-clients. It is used across the organization. It solves the problem of generating insights and aids in making a quick decision. Internally, it helps discover data patterns such as customer purchase behavior, sales trends, or production bottlenecks.
  • Excellent, mind-blowing variety of visualization wizards
  • Lightweight and secure
  • Variety of data sources supported by its connectors, from plain file, Excel, RDBMS, and Hadoop to NoSQL databases.
  • Easy deployment to production.
  • Padding and working with null or missing values.
  • Expensive Licenses
  • Slow rendering when the data volume is huge.
  • Real-time changes in visualization as the underlying data changes.
For a data warehouse environment, where a post-facto analysis is done, Tableau is well suited. For generating insights or summary analysis and for predictive analysis. The visualization, coupled with critical thinking, aids in data storytelling. For real-time dashboards, where refresh rates are high coupled with high data volumes, Tableau is less suited.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Tableau Public is not used as popular as MS excel by students on campus in terms of data analysis and visualization. However, lots of engineering students and those who are dealing with data analysis have been using Tableau for many projects and research. Tableau Public, together with Tableau Desktop, is available on computers for students from the engineering departments, the statistics department, and the business school. Using Tableau Public can create a viz that makes results from data analysis more approachable to your audience and the data can be obtained from any engineering experiments, statistic analysis, market surveying, etc.
  • Tableau Public can work with data that are differently formatted, such as MS Excel, .txt file, Google Sheets, not sure about MS Access.
  • GUI interface of Tableau Public is not that hard to start working on; Also, it can generate codes for the operations and so it is relatively easy to visualize and correct mistakes.
  • Lots of Tableau Public users upload their work to the online community, users can easily find very good figures/graphs that are similar to their problems and so they can use these figures/graphs as templates to modify and make their own ones.
  • Tableau Public is a free version which has limited space for data importing. Upgrade the software involves a large fee.
  • When importing data to Tableau Public, data file needs to be filtered out clearly, which means all columns need to be consistent, no extra space. Otherwise, it will cause problems in the dataset in Tableau Public.
Tableau Public has a variety of templates to create a visualization for data, which is much better than MS Excel. I also find that the way it presents the results from data analysis is more intuitive than other similar programs. If many workbooks are open in Tableau Public, the computer is easy to freeze sometimes.
Leah Jakaitis | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Tableau Public was used during the initial onboarding stages of the Tableau platform (when we were making decisions about what dashboard program to implement organization-wide). It was used across the entire organization in different capacities: as an analyst, I primarily worked on requirements gathering for dashboards from clients and internal teams, and then built the dashboards to the gathered specifications. Data engineers built APIs and data pipelines to provide the requisite data to test the platform. Clients and internal team members used Tableau Public to view and present different reports based on the data from different platforms. Tableau Public, like Tableau (corporate or enterprise), is a dashboard program meant to work with large datasets and visualize and present that data in digestible formats. In this sense, it addresses the issues of understanding the story data tells: its viz capabilities are great for summarizing data (say, monthly spending performance), and identifying trends using different visualizations.
  • Data visualization: lots of different options, including bar, scatter, pie, waterfall charts to explore relationships between variables, and to present findings/trends to different teams
  • Integrates readily with limited, though different data sources: TXT, CSV, TDE, Access
  • Exports reports for review of different dashboards: client-ready/team-ready, with a clean and tidy presentation in PDF format (or hardcopy)
  • The biggest drawback to the Public version of Tableau is that any data used in the program is 'public' and therefore not secure: workbooks are saved to the cloud, rather than locally
  • Tableau Public limits data ingestion to 10 million rows per source
  • Limited connections - can't connect to SQL databases to ingest data (must be through CSV, Access, TDE, or text files)
Tableau Public is great, especially if you're new to the platform or considering implementing it within an organization. The Public version has most of the capabilities of the full version, with extensive community documentation to troubleshoot issues you may run into. Additionally, there are many resources to check out Public workbooks from other users and communities: a GREAT learning resource to figure out new, innovative ways to visualize and present data. It is perfect for evaluating public datasets, for doing exploratory data analysis, or contributing to cross-organizational or extracurricular projects that may benefit from more sophisticated data analysis and exploration. Tableau Public, because it stores to the cloud and has limitations on connectivity (ie, cannot connect to SQL servers) is not suited for confidential, financial, PII, etc., data, and care should be taken to avoid including sensitive data in any of the Tableau Public workbooks used by an individual or organization.
Rosa Sanchez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Tableau has helped us to organize all our information in order to make our planning much easier. We started using it when we realized we needed to know all the details that the sales team was telling us, so we can make an emphasis on the most important products to offer, for example.

This software has been used by the whole organization; we all learned to use it and understand the meaning of every data, to use it for our daily jobs. In this way, we have used Tableau to organize our information and make our plans.
  • Data procesing
  • Business intelligence
  • Data organization
  • Visualization
  • Decision making
  • Dynamic graphics
  • Integration with other software
  • More options with the maps
If we want to know how our sales are going, Tableau helps us with this. Also, it lets us know what product is more popular and where our strength is. It's useful with inventory but it's not the best option, because it only shows you some things but not everything that you need.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is used to visualize data to use in blog posts, periodic reports, white papers, emails, and social media posts. It makes it easy to share data visualizations with the public, or to add them to documents intended for a specific audience. The platform is useful in keeping all of our data and reports consolidated in one place across multiple devices. It is used in both communications and development.
  • Integration with Goodle Drive
  • Allows you to highlight specific data points
  • Optimizes visualizations for viewing from different devices
  • In order to keep your data private, you have to buy a subscription
  • Problems with embedding on some websites
  • Must have a professional subscription to share with your network
Generating data-based reports for donors or board of directors. However, note that the public version should not be used for any data that you would like to keep private. Also good for creating unique data visualizations to use in presentations, or simpler visualizations to use in the text of a blog post or in a social media post.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Tableau is primarily used as an analytics tool for managerial accounting decisions regarding costing, inventory, and product performance. In addition, it is used for generating presentation content and segmenting regional target lists and performance results. This tool solves an array of business problems including effective content generation and acts as a user friendly, centralized financial information database.
  • Generates heat maps to segment product performance and volumes for each state if needed. This helps to allocate focuses on growth opportunities for particular states.
  • Quickly reads large files and increases productivity exponentially.
  • User interface is simple to use - great supporting resources if you're not understanding a specific area.
  • Simpler first time integration. Labor intensive first steps in order to get data to operate effectively. I needed to keep re-verifying numbers until I felt the integration was operating correctly.
General Management, Demand Planning, Product Management, Pricing Management, Financial Accounting, Managerial Accounting, Cost Management, Manufacturing or Operations Management, Business Development Management, and Marketing Support Services are some of the internal users within my environment which use Tableau's capabilities to an extent. In addition, integrating regional sales managers is essential for providing scorecards and reports to their field agencies.
JC Dringenburg | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Financial Org. implementation for a simple dashboard to review HR finance. This was used for the financial reporting over a given timeline for the payment system. A key peice was to present to client and using the Tableau visuals by both transferring to a PowerPoint and direct for the client with user case results.
  • Clean - easy to present to clients.
  • Simple - the training was shorter than other efforts I have done and the creation of materials effortless with helped with user adoption. Users liked the product so they were more inclined to learn it.
  • Customization - Being able to run short sprints was a key for my project and using on-the-go features allowed the customization by non-developers quickly.
  • Data analytics - this was not the strongest at forecasting models or any sort or predictive analytics. I use Hyperion for that which is way less user-friendly but much stronger.
User groups with resistance to change is an area it is well suited for. The ease of presentations made buy-in quick and [in] only 2 weeks. Also, user groups with very few if any "developers" because of the customization abilities. It is not suitable for forecasting models based on only 1-2 years.
Clifford Marsiglio | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Tableau Public is the free/lite version of the Tableau visualization tool intended for publishing public data using public data sources. Unlike Desktop, there are no data connectors with the exception of Excel or CSV text files. And there is no security. It is software that is intended to extend visualization of data for public consumption with both the data and the visualizations freely downloadable by anyone accessing it.
  • Tableau public is a great training tool to understand the basics of Tableau before buying it.
  • Great tool to extend Excel's visualization and to publish data for others.
  • Not useful for anything you need secure.
  • No ability to access databases. Static information only.
If I were still teaching, I would require this of all students. I have been blogging for personal reasons unaffiliated with the mission of my institution pseudo-anonymously and the information is all public sources -- The ability to do this and encourage readers to download the software and find inferences in this data is incredible. I have the full application suite including access to Tableau Server -- but this allows me to post my visualizations to Tableau's own server with up to 10GB of storage for free.
Steven Bohlender | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
Tableau Public is used by potential customers to evaluate both the Desktop and Server applications. In addition, visualizations that our company and / or customers want to publish on their website and share with community members are excellent applications for these tools.
  • Tableau Public offers free tools for creative people to learn the products with minimal investment "up front", as well as providing a place to share data visualizations and insights with the world. Visualizations are hosted (for no charge) by Tableau Software and may be accessed by members of the local community (via links from an organization's website) or from anywhere in the world. Workbook(s) published to Tableau Public may be downloaded by viewers to see techniques used by the creator, and get good ideas.
  • Tableau Public Premium is similar but removes the download functionality. This works well when the publisher wants to share access to the visualizations (e.g. on the organization's website) but NOT share the underlying workbooks nor data, keeping both confidential.
  • Tableau Public (both Desktop and Server) like their "for a fee" counterparts offer very easy to learn and use tools to transform data into pictures and gain insights into your data. Most organizations report a reduction in development time of 10x vs. other similar tools, due to the intuitive user interface. That said, with Tableau Public, published workbooks are "disconnected" from the underlying data sources and require periodic updates when the data changes. Users are limited to 1 Gb of storage space per user ID and password as well.
  • I would like to see better options for public sharing of visualizations and data from within the "for a fee" products as more and more organizations are moving in the direction of data sharing with partners and their communities.
Tableau Public products (for free) work well during the product evaluation phase, as well as for sharing data with partners and the community for no charge. A key question is what security the customer wants with the data, and how frequently the underlying data changes. If the data does not change frequently, and the user is not concerned about securing the data, then Public is a good choice.
Bonnie Holub | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • It works easily with Excel (.xls Excel 97-2003) format workbooks (see the related negative comment below).
  • It allows quick and easy reformatting of visualizations and charts.
  • It facilitates chart building because you can see which charts' input requirements are satisfied by your data, without leading you, lock step through a "chart building wizard" or other nonsense.
  • Modern (.xlsx) workbooks are not accepted in the free (public version). The public version accepts only a limited number of inputs from Microsoft Access and Excel (.xls 97-2003 format).
  • It seemed unable to read an Excel workbook with more than three pages.
  • You MUST post your results to the web. No confidential data here!
I was RELUCTANT to learn Tableau. I got a book about it. I saw the types of visualization that it produced, and, as an advanced Microsoft Excel user who is well versed in charts and graphs I was able to do just about all the visualizations I wanted to do there. I saw no need to change.
....until I saw that Tableau visualizations on the web were INTERACTIVE! That blew me away. That was the "killer app" for me. Then, when I learned that my visualizations were AUTOMATICALLY shared on the web, that was icing on the cake.
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