Downloading and Installing Tableau for Windows – Holowczak.com Tutorials

Introduction

The purpose of this tutorial is to give instructions on downloading and installing Tableau including how to obtain different licenses. Tableau is a very powerful data visualization tool that runs on Windows and Mac and also has Cloud versions. This tutorial focuses on the Windows version 10 of the Tableau Desktop software. Prior versions such as Tableau Desktop version 9.x and newer version such as Tableau 2019.2 and 2020.2 operate in a very similar fashion.

A second tutorial linked here covers how to use Tableau once you have it installed.

Downloading Tableau

There are three ways to obtain and work with a trial of Tableau software. You can contact the company and purchase a license. Tableau also offers a free 14-day license to anyone who would like to try it. Finally, if you are a student or faculty member, you may obtain a semester-long (or longer) trial license. Please review the different sections below to determine which type of license that is best for you.

Free Trial License

Visit the Tableau web site at www.tableau.com

Click on the Try Now button in the upper right corner of the page

To work with a trial license, fill in your business e-mail address and click the Download Free Trial button. Tableau will detect your operating system and whether it is 32- or 64-bit. Then it will initiate the download process of the installation file:

Now that the software has been downloaded, you may skip ahead to the next section to install Tableau.

Academic Trial License

For students and faculty at academic institutions, visit the https://www.tableau.com/academic/students web page:

Scroll down to the middle of the page:

For students, click on the Students link to bring up the Tableau for Students page:

Click the GET TABLEAU FOR FREE link in the middle of the page. Fill out the appropriate fields for First Name, Last Name, Date of Birth and Zip code for your campus location. Use your campus e-mail address. Select your College/University from the list and then click the Submit button.

Tableau will detect your operating system and whether it is 32- or 64-bit. Then it will initiate the download process of the installation file.

While that file is downloading, check your campus e-mail. You should receive a license key in the mail. Be sure to check your SPAM and Bulk Mail folders. The e-mail will look something like this:

Now that the installer has been downloaded, you can proceed to the installation steps shown on the next page.