Every company that uses Tableau Server has a few dashboards that are the most important. It’s the one that folks look at when they first get to work, the one that helps them chart their day ahead. Oftentimes, these dashboards contain a lot of information and can take a while to load for the first time each day. Luckily, once the view has loaded the first time, it moves into the cache and accessing it gets much faster. What if you could set up your server so that by the time employees get to work, the view for the day is already cached and ready. Spoiler alert, you can. Here’s how.

To force a cache of a view without actually having to go view it, we are going to set up an email subscription. To do that, navigate to the view you’d like to cache on Tableau server, then click the “Subscribe” button in the top right.

Doing so brings up a set-up dialogue to create an email subscription. You can use a test user, or your own user as the recipient, and set the email to run on a schedule first thing in the morning. You’ll want to set a time that is after any extract refreshes for the data source, if applicable, but before employees will start wanting to see the view.

What will happen, if set up appropriately, is that your Tableau Server will render the view for the email subscription according to the schedule you’ve set. As it renders the view, it will also cache the view. If someone wants to see the view, Tableau can bring it up from the cache instead of rendering it all over again. When everyone arrives to work and logs into Tableau Server to see the dashboard view, the server will quickly retrieve the view from the cache.

You can set up a dumby email subscription for as many workbooks, views, or custom views that you’d like. However, note that at a certain point, your server might not be able to get to them all in time before people arrive to work. At that point, sending email subscriptions will be slowing the server down more than speeding it up.

And there you have it! A sneaky way to pre-cache views on Tableau Server, speeding up processing time and making your co-workers very, very happy.