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Have you ever gotten to the end of presenting a gorgeous interactive dashboard only for an audience member to say, “Well, this looks great – but where do we download the spreadsheet with all this information?” (Just me?)

Massive spreadsheets aren’t usually the easiest way for stakeholders to absorb data, but sometimes they genuinely are needed – perhaps for record-keeping or compliance purposes, to allow additional analysis, or just to help users feel more comfortable with formats they’re used to. Incorporating spreadsheet downloads into your Tableau dashboards is a great way to meet these needs while still keeping key info presented in the most usable way.

When you use a spreadsheet download, it’s important to make it user-friendly and simple to navigate. Users can download a crosstab using the “download” icon on the standard Tableau site, but this requires an extra set of instructions and isn’t always the easiest for new users. I recommend adding two “extras” to make spreadsheet downloads as straightforward as possible for stakeholders.

1 ) Separate “downloadable” dashboards. On a standard dashboard, you probably have a whole lot of sheets – maybe some for visuals, some for tables, and some just for interactions.. If a user clicks the general “download” button from the site frame, they’ll have to figure out which sheet is the one they want in order to get a clean data download.

Plus, it’s often the case that none of the individual sheets contain all the info users need – when they’re combined they have the whole picture, but don’t work individually.

To combat this, you can create a separate tab in your workbook that’s intended only for downloads. This dashboard should contain just one sheet, and it should include all of the key data your user needs, nicely preformatted in the way users will want it in Excel. Then, add a navigation button (I used a download icon from google fonts as an image button) that takes the user to that preformatted dashboard.

2 ) Use the “Download” dashboard item! Once you have a dashboard that you want your users to download, I recommend including a “download” dashboard object on your page. Is it necessary? No. Users absolutely could click the download icon from the page frame. But adding a download button directly on your dashboard makes it easier for users to find, lets it still be visible in full-screen mode, and lets you pre-determine what file format is going to be downloaded.

These three factors simplify the experience for your user, and make downloading a spreadsheet easy – they just have to click on the “Download” icon right on your dashboard, and then select “Download”.

To add this button, drag the “download” object from the objects pane onto your dashboard. Open the button to edit, and set the export format to “crosstab”. (This will allow your user to download an Excel file or CSV – if you want a different format, you can of course select that!) You can then format your button as desired. Note: Downloading as crosstab will only work when the workbook is published to a server, so your button will be grayed out until published.