How to Subscribe Someone to a Tableau Dashboard
Sending your team the latest data shouldn’t feel like a chore. With Tableau’s subscription feature, you can automatically deliver dashboards directly to anyone’s inbox, ensuring everyone stays informed without any manual exporting or link sharing. This guide will walk you through exactly how to subscribe other users and groups to your Tableau dashboards and set up automated email reports.
First, What Are Tableau Subscriptions?
Tableau subscriptions are essentially automated email reports. Instead of requiring users to log into Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud to view a dashboard, a subscription sends a snapshot of that dashboard directly to their email on a set schedule. It’s a powerful feature that pushes key insights to your stakeholders, turning your dashboards from something they have to remember to check into a recurring, valuable update.
There are a few key benefits to using subscriptions:
Consistency:It ensures that everyone on your team is looking at the same information at the same time, whether it's daily sales numbers or weekly marketing performance.Convenience:Stakeholders, especially busy executives, get the high-level data they need delivered right to their inbox. They can view the key metrics on their phone without logging into a separate platform.Increased Adoption:By pushing dashboards to users, you make your data more visible and integrated into their daily workflow, which can significantly boost the adoption and impact of your analytics work.
The email typically includes an image of the dashboard, a PDF attachment, or both. It also contains a link back to the live, interactive dashboard on your Tableau server for deeper exploration.
Prerequisites: What You Need To Get Started
Before you jump into setting up subscriptions, you need to make sure a few things are in place. If the subscription option seems to be missing or greyed out, it’s likely due to one of these requirements not being met.
Dashboard and Server Setup
The dashboard you want to create a subscription for must be published to Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud. Subscriptions can't be set up from Tableau Desktop. Additionally, your Tableau Server administrator must have properly configured the email settings. If the server isn’t set up to send emails, the subscription feature won’t work. If you're a user and subscriptions aren't working, this is the first thing to check with your IT team or Tableau administrator.
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The Right Permissions
Permissions in Tableau are crucial, and they directly impact your ability to create and manage subscriptions. Here's a quick rundown of what's needed:
Your Permissions:Your user role (Creator, Explorer, or Viewer) and the specific permissions assigned to you by your site administrator determine what you can do. To subscribe other users to a dashboard, you typically need to be the owner of the workbook, a Project Leader, or have been granted the "Set Permissions" capability. A regular Viewer can usually only subscribe themselves.Their Permissions:The users you want to subscribe must have permission to view the dashboard in the first place. You cannot bypass Tableau’s security model by subscribing someone to a dashboard they don’t have access to. They at least need the "View" permission for that content.Data Permissions:The dashboard snapshot sent in the email will only contain data that the subscribed user is permitted to see. If you’re using user filters or row-level security, Tableau respects these rules, so each person gets a snapshot tailored to their data access rights.
If you're unsure about your permissions, a 'site administrator' is a user with the highest level of access to a Tableau Cloud site, often an IT support person for individual users or creators building and managing dashboards for a company or their clients.
How to Subscribe a User to a Tableau Dashboard: Step-by-Step
Once you’ve confirmed the prerequisites are met, subscribing a user is straightforward. Let’s walk through the steps.
1. Navigate to the Dashboard or View
Open the workbook on your Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud site and navigate to the specific dashboard or view you want to share.
2. Open the Subscription Dialogue
Look for the Subscribe icon in the toolbar at the top of the dashboard. It looks like an envelope or sometimes an eyeball. Click on it. This will open the subscription options dialogue box.
3. Add Users or Groups
Since you are already subscribed by default (if these are your dashboards), the dialogue box will default to your own subscription. Click the button or link that says Add Users or Groups. A search box will appear. Start typing the name of the user or group you wish to subscribe. Select them from the list when they appear.
You can add multiple users and groups to the same subscription schedule, which is incredibly efficient for teams.
4. Configure the Subscription Settings
This is where you customize how and when the email report is sent. You have several options:
Include this view:The default is the current dashboard. If the workbook has multiple dashboards, you can choose to send the entire workbook as a collection of views.Format:You can choose what format the user will receive.Run subscription as:Subscribing others will run as your user account's view. If others have filters on reports like an agency with client accounts, you pick each account you want to send reports to and configure which client report receives what view of the data.Subject:Customize the email subject line to be clear and descriptive. The default is something like, “Subscription for: [Dashboard Name].” You can change this to “Daily Sales Update” or “Weekly Marketing KPI Report” to give recipients immediate context.Message:Add a brief, optional message in the email body. You could use this to give context, provide a summary, or point out something for the team to look at. For example: "Team, here's our leads performance for last week. Please review before our Tuesday meeting."Schedule:This is the most important part. You can pick from predefined schedules set by your Tableau administrator (e.g., “Mornings at 8am”, "Every Monday Morning"). Choose the frequency, time of day, and time zone for when the delivery is sent, like "Weekly" on "Monday" at "9am". Many admins also set up specially-timed subscriptions, like "Every weekday," "Every 1st of the month," or options for refreshing "Every 'X' number of hours."
5. Subscribe
Once you’ve configured everything, click the blue "Subscribe" button at the bottom of the dialogue box. That’s it! The users you added will now start receiving email reports according to the schedule you set. You can always come back and view, modify, or delete subscriptions from this same menu under "My Subscriptions" as the owner.
Advanced Tips for Better Subscription Management
Once you’ve mastered the basics, here are a few extra tips and features to make your subscriptions even more powerful and relevant for your audience.
Subscribing Users to Custom Views
One of the best ways to personalize subscriptions is by using custom views. A custom view is a version of a dashboard where you have already applied specific filters, sorts, or a zoom. For example:
- A Q4 holiday dashboard for a retail team can have custom views for each regional manager where each manager has their own view filtered to show just data for the territories they're responsible for, like 'Regional Manager West'.
- A website analytics dashboard can have filtered views for campaigns run by the Paid Search team, showing results only for Google Ads.
- A project manager may have a special view filtered by "Critical," "Urgent," or "At Risk" project delivery metrics she wants her team to start the day viewing.
To use this, first create the view you want by applying filters. Then, click the "View" button in the toolbar and "Save current customization as a new default view..." giving it a memorable name (e.g., "East Region Sales"). Now, when you create the subscription, select that specific custom view instead of the default dashboard at the start of your workflow. When you set this new view as a default, any user on your team you give access to this URL will only have access to view this filtered view of the data you want them to focus on. Everyone you send it to must already have permissions to ensure you're not opening up a risk of anyone outside your organization viewing private info.
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Only Send When Data Exists
In the subscription settings, you might see an option that says Don't send if the view is empty. This is an incredibly useful feature. It prevents dashboards from being sent if there are no results based on refreshed data. This type of notification can cause anxiety but may also be unnecessary or annoying.
This option makes your dashboard subscriptions feel less like spam and guarantees to your team that when they get an email, the dashboard notification has information that requires their attention.
Troubleshooting Common Subscription Issues
If you or your users are running into problems, it's usually one of a few common culprits.
I don’t see the "Subscribe" icon:If the subscription icon is missing entirely, your administrator may have disabled subscriptions on that specific Tableau site or dashboard. Alternatively, you may not have the 'View' permissions to see and open the dashboard.The "Subscribe" icon is grayed out:This almost always means a permissions issue. You likely don’t have the proper rights to create a subscription for that content. Contact the dashboard owner or your administrator.Users aren’t receiving the emails:Ask your users to check their spam or junk folders, sometimes corporate email filters can be aggressive. This could also mean that Tableau Server’s email configuration needs to be reviewed by the server administrator. Alternatively, their permissions for this dashboard may not be correct and could have been changed since.
Final Thoughts
Setting up subscriptions in Tableau is a simple yet powerful way to bring data directly to your team. By automating the delivery of dashboards for reporting data like website campaign performance, inventory reports for supply chain decision-makers, and company-wide dashboards for CEOs, you can keep everyone aligned and increase the value your dashboards provide without adding to your own workload.
For teams looking for a more conversational and less technical approach to data, we've built Graphed to simplify this entire process. Instead of navigating menus to manage report distribution, you can just ask in plain language to have any report run once, save and send on a recurring daily schedule - creating and sharing automatically updated dashboards. All without needing an IT team to manage permissions, schedules, or server settings. We handle all those connections automatically in one place, like for Google, Facebook Ads, Shopify, and other apps your company may use.
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