A free version of Tableau to take on Power BI Desktop Edition

0:00Hey it's him here.

0:01Tableau desktop now has a free version that allows you to save to your desktop.

0:06Let me explain.

0:07Let's get stuck with it.

0:08Okay, so four days ago at Tableau Conference

0:11Ryan Ate during the keynote announced that Tableau Public Desktop Edition would be getting the ability to save locally, and Tableau have delivered on that promise almost immediately with a patch update to 24.

0:231.

0:24Incrementing it to 24.

0:261.

0:272.

0:27You can actually see that pop-up here inside of Tableau Public.

0:30Over on the right hand side, there's a nice big blue pop-up telling you, hey, you can now save locally.

0:36What this essentially means is that previously with Tableau Public, what you had to do was save up to Tableau Public.

0:42Essentially, you couldn't save a file to your sort of desktop or to a folder on your machine.

0:47And that kind of meant it was difficult to really get away with using Tableau Public in a work setting because Tableau Public was never really meant for an enterprise setting.

0:55And now that you can save locally, it means you kind of have a lot of room to play with and learn Tableau.

1:01And that's really fundamentally what they've done here.

1:03They've sort of incrementally added this capability so Tableau Public can really be the version

1:08that everyone uses to be familiar with Tableau.

1:10It still has a limitation with databases.

1:12You can't connect to databases.

1:14You can see here the list of databases is is basically non-existent.

1:17The only thing you'll be able to connect to are web data connectors, Google Drive and OData.

1:22That's essentially it.

1:23But static files on your machine will be fine.

1:25Microsoft Excel, Textfile, JSON, PDF, Spatial, and Statistical Files, all absolutely fine.

1:31So

1:31That's what you can do.

1:32Let me just show you this feature working because there is one gotcha that I that that made me kind of wonder where is this feature?

1:37So let me just show you this.

1:38I'll connect to a data source very, very quickly so you can see this capability.

1:42Here I am in Excel, sorry, in Tableau.

1:46I've downloaded a Superstore.

1:48I've opened it up, I've opened the orders table.

1:51Gone into sheet one.

1:52We're gonna build the fastest chart we can build.

1:54I'm freezing because I can't find segment.

1:56Let's go get cells and columns and boom.

1:58We'll make this vertical by rotating it.

2:00And voila, we have a chart.

2:01Now I want to save this.

2:03The first thing I did was I hit the save button because of course you do.

2:06That's what I've always done with Tableau Public.

2:08Expecting to see the save option here, it doesn't come up here.

2:11Actually what happens is that button still connects to Tableau Public, the website version.

2:17If I close that and instead we go to the file menu, which I'll pop up here at the top, you'll see we now have two options, save and save as.

2:25If I go ahead and hit save,

2:27Then this will allow me to save this to my desktop and we can pretty much go ahead and save that.

2:32And as soon as we do that, it will save that to my machine.

2:35So that's it.

2:36We're done.

2:37That's essentially all we need to do.

2:38It's super simple.

2:39I actually got the workbook here on my desktop.

2:41Let me show you that it's actually on my desktop.

2:43What I'm gonna have to do is swipe over out of the full screen experience.

2:46and bring over my desktop, you can see the file is right there.

2:49And if you go ahead and open this, you can open it with Tableau Public and you're pretty much good to go.

2:54I've also got the Apple Silicon version on my machine.

2:57And one detail about that is that because this Tableau Public edition is coming out before 24.

3:032, this version of Tableau Public on a Mac is not using the Apple Silicon native version.

3:09So what I'm expecting

3:10is with the next release of 24.

3:122, the public edition will get an Apple Silicon variant with the save local version of Tableau Public as well.

3:19So that's super good to hear.

3:20Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one.