By: Eric Parker
Eric Parker lives in Seattle and has been teaching Tableau and Alteryx since 2014. He's helped thousands of students solve their most pressing problems. If you have a question, feel free to reach out to him directly via email. You can also sign up for a Tableau Office Hour to work with him directly!
There’s an age old trick for Tableau Server published content I was recently reminded of and wanted to share. You can quickly and easily export a pdf, png or csv of a Tableau worksheet or dashboard by appending the file type at the end of a Tableau Server URL string. However, there are a few tricks to be aware of so let’s take a look.
Here’s a screenshot of a dashboard I recently published to Tableau Online. When we append .pdf, .png or .csv to the end of the URL slug we need to remove everything from the question mark forward.
PDF Creation
So for instance, here’s how the URL slug would be modified to generate a PDF.
Then, all I need to do is hit Enter after altering the URL and a PDF is generated!
A little further into the post we’ll look at how to incorporate this into your dashboard so your users can do this with a simple click.
PNG Creation
The process to generate a PNG is basically the same. You remove everything in the URL from the question mark forward and replace it with .png.
CSV Creation
Generating a csv of a Tableau Server visual has an extra twist; if you are generating a csv from a dashboard, it creates a csv of the worksheet with the earliest alphabetical name.
For instance, here’s what the csv looks like that is generated when I append .csv to this dashboard name.
The profit summary tile must be the first worksheet alphabetically. Here’s a little trick you can use if you have specific data you want to download through the csv command.
Create a worksheet that will be sure to be first alphabetically (I like to add AAA as a prefix).
Float the worksheet, hide the title, make it tiny and place it somewhere out of the way.
Now, upon appending .csv to the URL, it generates a csv of that “hidden” worksheet.
(As a helpful side-note, whichever worksheet you have selected in a dashboard upon publishing is the worksheet that the Download-->Data option will generate a table of. You can use the hidden worksheet for this too.)
Integrating PDF, PNG and CSV Exporting Into Your Dashboard
The following steps require your Tableau Server project name and the worksheet/dashboard names to remain the same otherwise you will have to re-create the URLs.
You can put an image icon in a dashboard, copy the URL of your dashboard and append the file type to the end as a Target URL action. Then, a selection of that icon will automatically generate the file type your end user selects.
The final state with some subtle icons at the bottom looks like this:
Shoutout to Andy Kriebel, Tim Schuringa and Tableau’s documentation for the inspiration and details needed to write this post.
Want help or advice with your own Tableau dashboards? Sign up for an office hour and we’ll spend some concentrated time helping you out!