Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Tableau Public
The best option for journalists and bloggers, Tableau Public is a free application and
visualization hosting service for sharing of publicly available data on the Web (exists as a
standalone Windows application, or can be published to via Desktop Professional).
All four of these products incorporate essentially the same data visualization user interface
and VizQL engine. As you can see from this list, Tableau Desktop Professional is the corner-
stone product that allows users to access the other products. The products differ in the types
of data sources users can connect to and how visualizations can be shared with others.
There are two other minor products that round out the offerings:
Tableau Public Premium
An annual subscription service that allows customers to prevent viewers of visualizations
hosted on Tableau Public from downloading the workbook and accessing the underlying
data (also requires purchase of Desktop Professional).
Tableau Reader
A free Windows application that allows users to open saved Tableau workbook files (
.tw-
bx
) and to view and interact with visualizations that have been created and saved locally
with Tableau Desktop or downloaded from the Web via Tableau Public. Users of Tableau
Reader cannot create new visualizations or change the design of existing ones.
Figure 2-1
illustrates how these products interact to allow the user to convert data stored in
various formats into visualizations and then share them with others.
