How to Give Access to Tableau Dashboard

Building a valuable Tableau dashboard is only half the battle, its true power is unlocked when you share it with your team, stakeholders, or clients. Getting those critical insights into the hands of the people who need them is what drives better decision-making. This guide will walk you through exactly how to give access to your Tableau dashboards, covering everything from publishing your workbook to managing granular user permissions.

Understanding Tableau's Sharing Ecosystem: Server vs. Cloud

Before you can share a dashboard, you need to understand where it's going to live. Tableau Desktop is the application you use to build your visualizations, but it isn't designed for large-scale sharing. To distribute your work, you'll publish it to one of two environments:

• Tableau Server: This is a self-hosted solution. Your company installs and maintains Tableau Server on its own infrastructure, whether it's on-premise servers or a private cloud. You have full control over the hardware, updates, and security configurations.
• Tableau Cloud (formerly Tableau Online): This is Tableau's fully hosted, software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. Tableau manages all the infrastructure in the cloud for you. It's a faster way to get up and running as there's no server maintenance required on your end.

While the user interface is nearly identical, knowing which one you're using is important because it's the environment where you will manage all user accounts, groups, and permissions.

Step 1: Publish Your Dashboard from Tableau Desktop

Everything starts by moving your dashboard from your local machine to your organization's shared Tableau environment. This process is called publishing.

How to Publish a Workbook

Follow these steps inside your completed workbook in Tableau Desktop:

1. Navigate to the top menu and click Server.
2. In the dropdown menu, select Publish Workbook...
3. If you're not already signed in, a dialog box will appear asking you to connect to your Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud instance. Enter the server URL and your credentials.
4. Once connected, the Publish Workbook dialog box will open. This is where you configure how your dashboard will appear on the server.

Here are the key settings to pay attention to in this dialog box:

• Project: Projects are like folders for organizing your content in Tableau Server/Cloud. Choose the project where you want the dashboard to reside (e.g., "Marketing Dashboards" or "Sales Performance").
• Name: Give your workbook a clear, descriptive name. This is the title users will see.
• Description: Add a brief description explaining what the dashboard shows and for whom it's intended.
• Sheets: By default, Tableau publishes all sheets in your workbook. You can click "Edit" here to select only the specific dashboards or worksheets you want to share, hiding any work-in-progress or "scratchpad" sheets.
• Permissions: This is your first opportunity to set access rules. The default is to use the project's permissions. It's often best practice to leave this as is and manage permissions at the project level later. However, you can click "Edit" to set custom rules for specific users or groups right from this screen.
• Data Sources: You'll need to choose how the workbook handles your data.

Once you've configured these options, click Publish. Your dashboard is now live on the server and ready for you to grant access!

Step 2: Manage User and Group Permissions

Simply publishing the dashboard doesn't automatically give people access. Now, you need to log in to your Tableau Server or Cloud site to configure who can see and interact with your dashboard. Tableau's permission system is powerful and hierarchical, flowing from Projects down to individual views (sheets).

Best Practice: Use Groups, Not Individuals

Before you touch any permission settings, embrace this best practice: always assign permissions to groups, not individual users. If you assign permissions one-by-one to colleagues, it becomes a nightmare to manage when people change roles or leave the company. By creating groups like "Marketing Department," "C-Level Execs," or "Sales Ops Team," you can manage permissions for the group. Then, when a new employee joins the marketing team, you just add them to that group, and they automatically inherit all the correct permissions a marketer should have.

Setting Permissions on a Dashboard

Navigate to the dashboard you just published and follow these steps:

1. Once you find your dashboard, click the three-dots menu (...) next to its name.
2. From the dropdown menu, select Permissions.
3. This opens the Permissions dialog, which displays a list of all existing permission rules for that specific workbook. Here you can add or modify rules.
4. Click + Add Group/User Rule, search for the group (or user) you want to grant access to, and select them.
5. Now, you assign a permission role. This is a template of capabilities. Tableau provides pre-built roles like Viewer, Explorer, and Creator. You can choose one of these roles, or set custom capabilities.

To really control access, you need to understand the main role levels:

• Viewer: This is the most common role for stakeholders. Users can see and interact with dashboards - clicking, hovering, and using filters. They can also use custom views and download summary data but cannot save changes or connect to data.
• Explorer: This role includes all Viewer abilities plus the ability to edit an existing dashboard in the web authoring environment, or create new content using data sources that have already been published to the server. This is great for an analyst who needs to answer follow-up questions but doesn't need to connect to raw databases.
• Creator: This is for power users, typically Tableau Desktop users. Creators can connect to new data sources, build totally new dashboards and data connections from scratch, and publish them to the server.

Locked vs. Customizable Permissions

Another crucial concept is whether permissions are "locked" at the project level. When configuring a Project, you can choose one of two permission models:

• Locked (Recommended): You set the permissions once for the entire project. Every workbook published to that project automatically inherits those exact same permissions. Individuals cannot set custom permissions for their own dashboards. This ensures consistency and makes administration much easier.
• C`ustomizable (or "Managed by Owner"): This model allows the content owners to modify permissions for their specific workbooks and views, making them different from the project's defaults. This provides more flexibility but can become chaotic if not managed carefully.

Alternative Sharing Methods

Sometimes, users don't need interactive access inside the Tableau Server environment. Tableau provides a few other ways to get your data into people's hands.

1. Share a Direct Link

Once you've granted someone Viewer permissions, the easiest way to send them the dashboard is with a direct link. While viewing the dashboard, click the Share button at the top. This provides a direct URL you can copy and paste into an email or messaging app.

2. Create Subscriptions for Email Delivery

What if your executives want a performance update in their inbox every Monday at 8 AM? For this, you use Subscriptions. You can subscribe entire groups to a dashboard.

• While viewing a dashboard, click the Subscribe button in the toolbar.
• Add the users or groups you want to subscribe.
• Choose the format: you can send a PNG image of the dashboard, a PDF attachment, or link back to the dashboard.
• Set the schedule (e.g., daily, weekly on a specific day, monthly) and time.

Now, Tableau will automatically email a snapshot of the dashboard to that group according to the schedule you defined.

3. Embed Dashboards in Other Platforms

Tableau makes it easy to embed your interactive dashboards directly into high-traffic destinations like your company's intranet portal, a Confluence page, or a webpage. Click the Share button and then copy the Embed Code. You can paste this HTML code into any platform that supports it to display the live, interactive dashboard without making users navigate to Tableau Cloud/Server.

Final Thoughts

Effectively sharing your Tableau dashboard is a two-step dance: publishing it to a shared server environment, and then carefully configuring access through user and group permissions. By using a structured approach - like setting locked permissions at the project level and assigning roles to groups - you can ensure the right people have access to the right data, promoting a data-informed culture throughout your organization.

Tableau is incredibly powerful for deep analysis, but sometimes the process of publishing, managing permissions, and training users can feel cumbersome when you just need a simple answer. At Graphed, we've designed our platform to eliminate this friction. We allow anyone to create and share dashboards using simple, natural language. You can just ask for "a line chart of our Shopify revenue vs. Facebook Ads spend for the last 60 days" and share that report with a colleague via a secure link - all in under a minute, with no complex user roles to configure. You can learn more and try it for free with Graphed.