Tableau Public is software, similar to Tableau Desktop, that you can download and use for free with some limitations: you need to publish your work online in a public environment, and you don't have access to all the connectors available in Tableau Desktop.

Tableau Public is, in fact, much more than that.

Tableau Public is like a social network, but while people are sharing pictures of their cats and kids on Facebook, you can only find the best visualizations available in Tableau Public. As we are data lovers, here are some figures: 250,000 Tableau Public users have published more than 1,000,000 Workbooks, generating more than 1,000,000,000 views. 

On the Tableau Public website, you can find a Viz Of The Day section on the homepage (every day, a new Workbook is promoted by Tableau: https://public.tableau.com/en-us/s/), and many Featured visualizations in different categories (Greatest Hits, Sports, Social Goof, and so on). You can find a list of the current Featured Authors, a blog, and many resources to keep learning. You can also search for any author or interest. But wait, the best is yet to come.

At the bottom of every visualization published in Tableau Public, there are some buttons to open the visualization in fullscreen, share, and the best: download. When you click on the download button, you can get an image, the data, a crosstab, a PDF, and – are you ready? – the Workbook itself! Even the most beautiful Workbooks can usually be downloaded (it's the author's choice). It is one of the greatest ways to learn. I discover a lot by downloading the Workbooks and figuring out how the authors built them.

Creating a Tableau Public account is very simple. Once you have an account, you can start to follow authors you like and publish Workbooks. If you post a visualization, you can make it featured, delete it, or hide it with the icons you see here:

Finally, for all your published visualizations, you can edit the description and specify whether you'll allow the Workbook and its data to be downloaded. It may be against the philosophy of Tableau Public to refuse it to be downloaded, but some companies use Tableau Public as a communication tool, and they can't share all their data.

Here's what you can edit on your published Workbooks:

The main reason why people don't share Workbooks in Tableau Public is that they don't know what data to share. The next section resolves that problem.