What is the Limitation of Tableau Public?

Tableau Public is a fantastic, free tool for creating stunning and interactive data visualizations. It's a popular starting point for aspiring data analysts, journalists, and hobbyists looking to tell stories with data. However, while it’s incredibly powerful for a free platform, it comes with specific limitations you need to understand before committing to using it for a project. This guide will walk you through the key limitations of Tableau Public so you can decide if it's the right fit for your needs.

The Golden Rule of Tableau Public: Everything is Public

This is, without a doubt, the most important limitation to understand, and it’s right there in the name. When you save a workbook in Tableau Public, you aren’t saving it to your local computer. Instead, you are publishing it to the Tableau Public web server, where it becomes visible and accessible to anyone on the internet.

Each visualization you create gets a unique URL, and anyone with that link can view your workbook, see the underlying data, and even download the entire workbook for themselves. There is no option for private or restricted access.

For a business, this is a non-starter for almost all internal data. Imagine publishing a dashboard showing:

Your company's detailed monthly sales figures by region.
A list of your top customers and their lifetime value.
Employee performance metrics or salary information.
Marketing campaign performance with specific costs and conversion rates.

Uploading any of this sensitive or confidential information would be a massive security and privacy risk. Your competitors, the public, and anyone else could easily access data that should remain confidential. Because of this, Tableau Public is fundamentally unsuitable for internal business intelligence, financial analysis, or any work involving personally identifiable information (PII).

When Is It Okay for Everything to Be Public?

This public-by-default model is fine for specific situations. Tableau Public shines when used for its intended purpose:

Building a Professional Portfolio: If you're looking for a job as a data analyst, creating a public portfolio of your best work is essential. Using clean, publicly available datasets is a great way to showcase your skills.
Data Journalism and Blogging: Journalists and bloggers often use Tableau Public to create interactive charts and maps to enhance their stories with data from public sources like government websites or research institutions.
Academic Projects: Students can use it to complete assignments and projects using non-sensitive academic datasets.
Personal Hobby Projects: Interested in analyzing professional sports stats, movie box office numbers, or global weather patterns? Tableau Public is the perfect place for these kinds of passion projects.

Connecting to Your Data: Limited Options

A key strength of paid BI tools like Tableau Desktop or Power BI is their ability to connect to a vast array of data sources - from complex corporate data warehouses to real-time cloud services. Tableau Public is much more constrained in this regard.

Supported Data Sources

Tableau Public allows you to connect to local files, covering a lot of ground for personal projects. The main connection types are:

Spreadsheets: Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets are fully supported.
Text Files: You can connect to common text file formats, including comma-separated values (.csv), tab-separated values (.tsv), and other text files (.txt).
Spatial Files: Formats like KML, Shapefiles, and MapInfo tables for creating maps.
Statistical Files: You can use data from SPSS, SAS, and R.
Web Data Connectors (WDCs) and OData: These offer limited ways to connect to some web data sources, but they often require technical setup and are less user-friendly than direct integrations.

What’s Missing? No Live Database Connections

The biggest gap here is the inability to connect directly to live databases. This means you cannot connect Tableau Public to sources like:

SQL Databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, etc.
Cloud Data Warehouses: Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, Snowflake.
SaaS applications: There are no direct connectors for platforms like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Shopify.
Many other cloud service databases.

This matters because without a live connection, your dashboards cannot be refreshed in real time. Your data is static. If the source data changes, you have to manually download the new data (e.g., export a new CSV), open your workbook, update the data source with the new file, and then republish the entire visualization to the web. This manual process is time-consuming and makes Tableau Public impractical for tracking key business metrics that change frequently.

For example, you can't build a real-time sales dashboard that updates every time a new order comes in through Shopify. You'd be stuck in a cycle of exporting Shopify reports to a CSV file every day and republishing your work just to stay current.

Feature Restrictions: What You Can't Do

Beyond the major privacy and data connectivity limitations, Tableau Public also lacks several features that are standard in its paid counterparts. These restrictions impact your workflow, the scale of data you can handle, and your ability to automate tasks.

Saving Your Work: Public or Bust

As mentioned earlier, you can't save your work locally onto your computer. The only save option is to publish to the Tableau Public server. This means you can't have a file of "work in progress" sitting on your desktop. Every save is a public publication. While you can hide a visualization from your public profile gallery, it is still accessible to anyone who has a direct link, so it’s never truly private.

Data Size and Row Limits

Tableau Public enforces a limit of 15 million rows of data per workbook. While this sounds like a lot - and for most personal projects, it is - it can become a constraint when working with larger datasets, particularly granular event-level data from websites or apps. Businesses analyzing years of transaction data or clickstream web data can easily exceed this limit.

No Automation or Scheduling

Even if you're using a supported data source like Google Sheets, you cannot schedule automatic data refreshes. In Tableau's paid products, you can set a schedule (e.g., "refresh data every hour") to keep dashboards up-to-date automatically. With Tableau Public, the refresh process is always manual, reinforcing the idea that it’s not built for operational business reporting that needs to be consistently current.

Advanced Analytics and Collaboration Features

Tableau Public does not include some of the more advanced analytics and administrative features available in Tableau Desktop, such as:

User-Level Security: You can't implement row-level security, which is a feature that restricts data visibility based on who is viewing the dashboard (e.g., a sales manager can only see data for their team).
Collaboration Tools: The collaboration options are minimal compared to a professional BI environment like a self-hosted Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud, where teams can comment on dashboards and manage permissions.
Tableau Prep Builder: Access to Tableau's intuitive data cleaning and preparation tool is not included with Tableau Public. All your data cleaning must happen before you bring it into the software.

Who Is Tableau Public For (and Who Isn’t It For)?

After reviewing these limitations, a clear picture emerges of the ideal user for Tableau Public.

You should use Tableau Public if:

You are a student learning data visualization.
You are a job seeker building a professional portfolio with public data.
You are a journalist or blogger creating data stories for a public audience.
You are a hobbyist exploring datasets out of personal curiosity.
You are evaluating Tableau's core visualization capabilities before buying a subscription.

You should look for another tool if:

You are a business needing to analyze confidential sales, marketing, financial, or customer data.
Your team needs real-time dashboards connected to live data sources like a SQL database or a cloud application.
You need to securely share dashboards with specific colleagues or clients while restricting access for others.
You are an analyst in a company who needs to automate recurring reporting workflows.

Final Thoughts

In a nutshell, Tableau Public is an incredible platform for learning data visualization and sharing amazing stories built on public information. But its core design - where everything is public, data connections are limited to static files, and manual updates are the only option - makes it impractical for internal business analytics and reporting.

For many teams, especially in marketing and sales, the manual grind of downloading files and the privacy concerns are significant hurdles. At Graphed, we've focused on solving this exact problem. We've built a platform that connects securely to all your live data sources - like Google Analytics, Shopify, Facebook Ads, and Salesforce - and lets you build real-time dashboards just by asking questions in plain English. There's no steep learning curve and no wrestling with CSVs, allowing you to get from data to insights in seconds, not hours.