Tableau Software is an R&D heavy company, they’re just continuously throwing new features and releasing new versions. But what if some of our colleagues or clients are still not upgraded to the latest Tableau Desktop version? How can we share our superb new workbook? XML Hacking? Jeff’s converter tool?

Forget all. Tableau Desktop can do it out of the box.

UPDATE: Two months after publishing this post from version 10.2.1 Tableau Software removed the DebugMenu command line option. So from here this is history.

Tableau Save as Previous Version

The “Save as version…” option is included in the DebugMenu, you just need to enable this hidden gem when you’re starting Tableau.

Enable DebugMenu in OSX

The steps are easy:

1. open a console (well, I hope it is always open).
2. type open -a Tableau --args -DDebugMenu  and hit enter
3. a wild DEBUG menu item fill appear

You can also add this paremeter to your Dock item. See http://superuser.com/a/271697 for details.

Enable DebugMenu is Windows

Just start Tableau.exe with -DDebugMenu  command line option. You can also add it as an option to the desktop shortcut to enable debug menu all the time:

Enable DebugMenu on Windows

Debug menu does not have any negative effect, you can keep it enabled all the time.

Does it work? Does not? Let me know so I can help you.

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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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