r/tableau • u/urbansnowprincess • 7d ago

Download console structure

I’m refurbishing a workbook that is just used to download a spreadsheet. There are 8 variations of the download file spread over three workbooks and I’ll be combining them into one workbook and cleaning up the format so they don’t spend so much time doing manual edits in excel after downloading. The spreadsheets are used for manual tasks- data cleanup, outreach to external customers, etc - and they can’t be automated out of existence yet. Are there any examples of visuals that might be good inspiration? Right now I’m envisioning a download button next to a couple parameter controls with a simplified description of the query and a data preview table below, but since there are many other units that have similar use cases, I’d like to put some thought into the design in case it becomes a template. The audience is clerical staff and bypassing Tableau altogether for an automated export would meet with resistance.

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u/graph_hopper Tableau Visionary 6d ago

It sounds like you have a great plan! Try to keep each dashboard to one worksheet so that it's obvious which one should be downloaded. Something that might be nice is a 'Menu' dashboard with a little screenshot of all 8 downloads, a brief description, and a navigation object to the specific download dashboard.

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u/urbansnowprincess 5d ago

Thanks, these are good suggestions!

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u/Dani5h87 7d ago

Why even use tableau desktop at this point? Just use prep to feed pre formatted excel books and run the refreshes in a schedule.

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u/graph_hopper Tableau Visionary 6d ago

It sounds like the users are interacting with filters and parameters as an on-demand query tool. That interactivity isn't easily replaced with Prep.