Report Sharing Options in Tableau — Pros and Cons

Let’s see how to implement the following use case in Tableau.

A National Sales Manager needs to send a standard weekly performance report to 20 District Managers and 250 Branch Managers. These people are busy! They do not have the time to login to a portal, interact with their report and analyze their KPIs in depth. Nor does the organization want to buy 270+ user licenses just for this purpose.

All they need is a PDF in their inbox customized for their KPIs, which they can discuss with their manager for 10 minutes on Monday morning as they start their week.

Tableau Report Distribution Options

Like other BI tools, Tableau provides options to subscribe to reports and to embed reports. These options require users to have Tableau licenses of some sort.

1. Subscriptions are easily set up for users but are difficult to manage when user numbers go up. They require ongoing system administration support for user onboarding, offboarding, and role changes. See https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/2019/10/new-pdf-feature-20193-supports-report-bursting-workflow for more detail on PDF subscriptions.
2. Embedding: External users can access report content and you would require a dev team to implement it. Among other things, it requires mapping of application users and implementation of trusted authentication. Further, administering it for external clients can be a complex and expensive activity. Lastly the users need to log into a web application to view reports instead of reports being delivered to them.
3. Report Bursting: For the embedding use case, Tableau doesn’t provide any out of the box solution. Instead, we need to use other commercial and open-source tools and libraries which allow the bursting of reports.

• VizAlerts: Opensource and works only with Tableau Server. You have to install and manage it yourself or work with commercial vendors. Also, you need to provision infrastructure to run it.
• Tabcmd: Tabcmd is a command line utility to automate Tableau tasks. Tabcmd works for both Tableau Online and Server. Here’s an article detailing how to burst reports using Tabcmd. Tabcmd is included with your Tableau licenses. Tabcmd involves scripting and works well if you have to run distribution as a one-time activity.
• Tableau REST APIs: With Tableau APIs you can automate the report bursting process. Tableau has neatly detailed APIs around applying filters, downloading views as a PDF, etc. APIs provide you a lot of flexibility and you can build any workflow using them. The downside is that you need a dev team to write, host and manage an application that automates the tasks for you.
• Managed Services: There are third-party software providers who provide solutions around Tableau report bursting. These providers can be evaluated on their ease of use, pricing, security, and scalability.

In summary, out of the box methods for report distribution in Tableau are not easily scalable and involve cost and complexity.

BI Helper

BI Helper bihelper.tech is a simple, secure, and cost-effective SaaS solution for PDF report generation and distribution in Tableau and Power BI. You only need a single Tableau / Power BI license to use BI Helper.

Resource: BI Helper Tutorial | Report Distribution in BI Tools | Configure a Tableau Report in BI Helper with Filters