The Northeastern Tableau Community

The Tableau community at Northeastern meets approximately quarterly to exchange ideas and share information. If you would like to be informed about these events and other Tableau information, we encourage you to join our Teams site for Northeastern Tableau users. There, you can ask the group a question, look for information on upcoming user group meetings, and access training and education materials. You can also  join the Tableau User group.

Licensing

For Students only 

Students can download a free version of Tableau Desktop: Public Edition using their Northeastern student email address.

Faculty, Staff, and Sponsored Accountholders only

Faculty who are using Tableau for teaching purposes can request an
instructor license using their Northeastern email address.

All faculty, staff and sponsored accountholders 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.

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.

For staff who need to request an Explorer or Creator license, please complete and
submit the Tableau Request Form.

Tableau Server

The Tableau Server, hosted and maintained by ITS, is divided into sites, typically along college, unit or departmental lines.  Each site has a site administrator who controls the ability of faculty or staff to publish to their site via “permissions” and is responsible for communicating with Tableau users in their group (such as in the case of periodic server downtime for server maintenance). 

If your department does not have a site on the server but would like to start one, please submit a request by emailing [email protected]. Be sure to include the name of the new site administrator. 

Security and Permissions

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 Policy on Protecting Confidential Information. 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.