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

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2024-05-05
- **Format:** Video · 4 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Data visualisation, Tool strategy, Industry trends
- **Tools:** Power BI; Tableau (public)
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/a-free-version-of-tableau-to-take-on-power-bi-desktop-edition
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sW-CnZ-ALM

Tableau Public Desktop Edition now lets you save workbooks locally to your machine, following an announcement at Tableau Conference and a quick patch to version 24.1.2. I explain what this means, the database limitations that remain, and demonstrate the save feature including one gotcha around the save button.

## Key takeaways

- Tableau Public Desktop Edition can now save workbooks locally to your machine, not just to the Tableau Public website.
- The old toolbar save button still publishes to Tableau Public online; to save locally you must use File > Save or Save As.
- Database connections remain unavailable in Tableau Public, but static files like Excel, text, JSON, PDF, spatial and statistical files all work.
- Web data connectors, Google Drive and OData are the only live connection options.
- The current Mac build is not yet Apple Silicon native, so a native version is expected with the 24.2 release.

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/a-free-version-of-tableau-to-take-on-power-bi-desktop-edition

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just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena