Book Image

Maximizing Tableau Server

By : Patrick Sarsfield, Brandi Locker
Book Image

Maximizing Tableau Server

By: Patrick Sarsfield, Brandi Locker

Overview of this book

Tableau Server is a business intelligence application that provides a centralized location to store, edit, share, and collaborate on content, such as dashboards and curated data sources. This book gets you up and running with Tableau Server to help you increase end-user engagement for your published work as well as reduce or eliminate redundant tasks. You’ll explore Tableau Server's structure and how to get started by connecting, publishing content, and navigating the software interface. Next, you’ll learn when and how to update the settings of your content at various levels to best utilize Tableau Server’s features. You’ll understand how to interact with the Tableau Server interface to locate, sort, filter, manage and customize content. Later, the book shows you how to leverage other valuable features that enable you and your audience to share, download, and interact with content on Tableau Server. As you progress, you’ll cover principles to increase the performance of your published content. All along, the book shows you how to navigate, interact with, and use Tableau Server with the help of engaging examples and best practices shared by recognized Tableau professionals. By the end of this Tableau book, you’ll have a solid understanding of how to use Tableau Server to manage content, automate tasks, and increase end-user engagement.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting Started with Tableau Server
4
Section 2: Navigating and Customizing the Tableau Server Interface
8
Section 3: Managing Content on Tableau Server
12
Section 4: Final Thoughts

Utilizing published data sources

In Chapter 1, What is Tableau Server?, you learned that a published data source is a data source that has been created and published to Tableau Server. Once on the server, a single published data source can be used by multiple workbooks. Published data sources are useful when your organization has important metrics that will be used in multiple reports or visualizations housed in different workbooks. If each workbook has its own data source, it not only takes up more room on Tableau Server and consumes more server resources when each extract refreshes, but it can also cause data variances if the workbooks are not refreshed at the same time. For example, if one workbook refreshes on Monday and another refreshes on Wednesday, but both workbooks visualize the same business metric, then end users are likely to be confused and contact you with questions when they notice differences in the data presented by the two workbooks. To avoid this, you can create...