Tableau at Northeastern is a combination of desktop software and the ability to publish desktop creations to a server for sharing. The two components you need to do this are explained below.

Tableau Creator is the software installed on your own machine for the purpose of connecting to many different types of data sources, exploring the data, and creating interactive dashboards, analyses, and repots. A Creator license entitles you to use Tableau Desktop for data exploration and visualization and Tableau Prep Builder for querying, combining, shaping, and cleaning your data. This license also allows you to publish your data visualizations to the Tableau Server.

Tableau Server is available to any faculty or staff member at Northeastern to publish and share Tableau workbooks internally.  No Tableau license is necessary just to view Tableau workbooks that other people have published.  The server is located at https://tableau.northeastern.edu.

Faculty who are using Tableau for teaching purposes may submit a request online on the Tableau website to receive a free license.  Students are also eligible to receive a free license via the Tableau website request form.

All faculty and staff can log into Tableau Server to view content to which they have access.  For staff who need to view and modify existing visualizations and data sets, Northeastern University offers the Explorer license, which meets the needs of most users.  To request an Explorer license, please contact the Tableau Site Administrator (see list below) for the site containing the content you would like to access.

The Tableau Creator license is available for advanced analysts who will use Tableau Prep to obtain and clean data sets for visualizations that will be published to an established site using Tableau Desktop. A limited number are available for use by the Northeastern analytics community, so if you need a license, please submit a ServiceNow ticket.

As with any data at Northeastern, you must be granted access to the information source to be able to supply data to your Tableau workbooks. Also, any publishers of Tableau workbooks to the Tableau Server are responsible for properly securing the contents via appropriate permissions. It is a best practice to supply Viewer (and/or Interactor) privileges to those who will see your Tableau workbook, and remove download (data or workbook) privileges. Please use the Data Classification guidelines as well as the Confidentiality of University Records policy when determining who should see the information you are providing. These and other helpful policies can be found on the policy page, and Best Practices for permissions can be found on the Northeastern Tableau user group site.