• Users can click on a specific sheet on a dashboard and then export a CSV via the tiny button on the toolbar. Open it in excel, save as excel.
• You can export a CSV using Tabcmd. Open it in excel, save as excel.
• You can add .csv to the end of the URL like
  
  http://[Tableau Server Location]/views/[Workbook Name]/[View Name].csv

  1	http://[Tableau Server Location]/views/[Workbook Name]/[View Name].csv

  
  in the browser. Then you get something (still a CSV), typically, the first sheet on the dashboard alphabetically. And yes, open it in excel…

Some of these methods can grab the underlying data only, not the crosstab data and yes, all of them are CSV based. They do the work, but are not satisfying enough to cover all use cases where users want excel with crosstabs.

Tableau Excel Extractor tool

That’s why we built a fourth (and completely free, open source) solution with a relatively boring name: Starschema Tableau Excel Extractor tool.  It’s a command line tool for extracting data from workbooks based on node.js, so it’s fast and platform independent. It can

• Export directly to xlsx files
• Export all the sheets to a single Excel file (Tableau sheets become Excel sheets)
• Recognize basic data formats: numbers become numbers, etc. so you can do your math immediately
• Are CSV separators varying sheey-by-sheet? No problem. The tool auto-detects it.
• Just specify your username/password, copy and paste the (customized) view URL, and press Enter. That’s it.

It works only for custom views (you must save your view as custom) so please make sure you’re not trying to extract the default view.

How to install the tool

Usage

Copy-paste customized view URL

Then, construct the following command:

tableau-extract -u <your tableau username> -p <your tableau password> http://stage.starschema.biz:8000/#/views/Superstore/SalesForecast/AdministraTOR/churn162?:iid=1

1	tableau-extract -u <your tableau username> -p <your tableau password> http://stage.starschema.biz:8000/#/views/Superstore/SalesForecast/AdministraTOR/churn162?:iid=1

So, the last part of the command is the pasted url. Enter and voila. You will be entertained with some text for geeks, but the most important thing is the last line: the generated Excel file name. You can find in in the current directory, if everything went well.

Tableau Excel Extractor in action

However, be careful: it is still a proof-of-concept tool. It does not give too much information if something goes wrong, it simply overwrites previously generated Excel files without warning, etc. And as always: use it at your own risk.

Did it work? Are you having issues? Leave a comment.

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Tamás Földi

Director of IT Development at Starschema

Decades of experience with data processing and state of the art programming. From nuclear bomb explosion simulation to distributed file systems. ethical hacking, real time stream processing practically I always had a great fun with those geeky ones and zeros.

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