Tableau Tools

This gem provides a collection of classes useful for analyzing and manage Tableau workbooks and their major components, along with some utility classes.

Philosophy

Tableau Workbook governance should be:

• simple and straightforward in the way that basic data analysis is simple and straightforward in Tableau,
• free, as in beer and speech, and
• constantly evolving to incorporate new and interesting things people can think of to see about do with their Workbooks.

Tableau Tools are designed in the model of mini-tools, small independent tools that are individually useful and can be used together to accomplish broader tasks.

The gem is released to the Tableau community, and to data analysts at large, in the hope that it will prove to be useful and valuable, that people will build useful things with it, and that they will offer improvements and extensions to it.

TWB - the Tableau Workbook gem

Much of the functionality of Tableau Tools is provided by the classes in TWB that actually interact with Tableau workbooks and other files (e.g. TDS).

Tableau Tools' classes are designed to for usability, shielding the TWB classes' technical nature.

In effect, TWB classes know how to access Workbooks, Tableau Tools classes know how to do something useful with the TWB classes.

History and rationale

A number of Ruby scripts that parse Workbooks and emit a variety of their contents/properties have been published at Tableau Friction, including a couple that identify Calculated fields and the fields they reference: http://tableaufriction.blogspot.ca/2015/02/more-calculated-field-analysis-fields.html http://tableaufriction.blogspot.ca/2014/09/do-you-know-what-your-calculated-fields.html

Other scripts find and record other useful information, still others enable Workbook management, e.g. unhiding worksheets and making field comments consistent across workbook. One of them produces HTML pages with dynamic dashboard wire frames, making it easy to see what's in the dashboards and their properties

Historical: TWIS - The Tableau Workbook Inventory System

There's also TWIS - the Tableau Workbook Inventory System, an application that parses workbooks and extracts most of their important elements into CSV files, allowing one to see things such as which sheets are in which with dashboards, the data sources they connect to, and which Workbooks they're in. TWIS also generates diagrams/maps of the Workbook - Dashboard - Worksheet - Data Source relationships, one for each Workbook in PDF, PNG, and SVG.

TWIS is described and available here: http://betterbi.biz/TWIS.html

TWIS is deprecated, no longer maintained

I created TWIS in Java, beginning in 2007. It was very valuable but became exceedingly difficult to maintain.