For my final #TipWeek tip, I’ll be focusing on a Tableau Server command that may prove helpful at some point. If ever you find yourself working on Tableau Server and want to download one of your views as a pdf, it’s as simple as a tabcmd command.

First, navigate to the page that has the view you want to download as a pdf. From there, copy the portion of your URL from /view to the question mark:

Open up Command Prompt and type in

tabcmd get (yoururl).pdf

Press enter and the command will run and place a pdf file in the directory you were in when you ran the command:

In my code, you’ll notice I included the command –no-certcheck. This has nothing to do with what you need to do to get the pdf, I’ve only included it here because of earlier training we did this week to convert our servers from http to https (Bonus tip, if you need to access things on an UNCERTIFIED https server in your command prompt, try using –no-certcheck if things aren’t working the way you’d expect!).

If you find that you are getting an error message like this when you try to open the pdf, you may need to log in and specify which site you are trying to extract your view from:

To do this, type:

tabcmd login –s (your server) –t (site) -u (username)

Enter your password, then you are ready to run the tabcmd get line to extract your pdf. If you want to extract from your default site, then do not include the “-t (site)” part. Like so:

And now you have a shiny new pdf:

That’s it for tip week, but it’s definitely not the end of blog tips. I used to struggle to come up with regular blog posts because, being fresh out of academia; I was still sitting down at my desk with a bunch of index cards and notepaper writing out outlines, brainstorms, and drafts before putting anything up on the blog. TipWeek has been great because it kind of forces you to get out of that headspace and put relevant content out that doesn’t have to be so edited and polished. At the end of the day, these blog posts try to serve the same purpose as academia in that knowledge is made to be shared, explored, and critiqued. But if it’s taking me forever and a half to get my words out there, my knowledge can only remain to be shared. Cheers to much more knowledge sharing in the weeks to follow!