Copy Data in Tableau | Tiny Tip

by Chris Meardon

Let’s say we have some chart in Tableau like below and wanted to quickly copy this data and use it elsewhere. There are a couple ways that you can do this and I will briefly show you them.

Firstly, there’s Duplicate as Crosstab
By right clicking on the worksheet tab, you can select this option and it will essentially create a table of the data in the view.

It’s from this area/line chart into a table in Tableau. You may find this useful for error checking your calculations. But what about it you want to actually copy the data out of Tableau?

Copy Worksheet
By going to Worksheet → Copy in the toolbar there are two options that allow you to copy data out of Tableau. The first of which (literally called Data) will allow you to copy the data in the structure of the datasource and paste it elsewhere.

Giving a table like this (once pasted into Excel for example).

You may have noticed that the shortcut (Ctrl + C) for this operation is labeled in the menu and personally, this is how I would go about using the copy feature. It’s the default command for copying so it’s not too bad to get in the habit of.

The second option (i.e. Worksheet → Copy → Crosstab), which will copy data in a similar format to the Duplicate as Crosstab feature, placing it on your clipboard ready for pasting elsewhere. You can also paste it directly back into tableau and you will create a clipboard datasource which you can then analyse straight away.

Enjoy!

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Chris Meardon

Fri 27 Mar 2020

Fri 27 Mar 2020

Tue 24 Mar 2020