Hey Tim here and today I’m going to be showing you how to install multiple versions of Tableau on your desktop. Now one of the challenges of running lets say tableau 9.3 and also testing the Beta, or maybe in your organisation you’re rolling out a newer version of Tableau, and you still need to keep the older version running, is that the default version is what opens your workbook. So I’ve just installed Tableau 10, the beta on my machine and so when I double click and existing workbook that was edited in 9.3, Tableau 10 opens, and I get this warning saying, that when I save this workbook in Tableau 10, it’s going to upgrade the workbook. Now when you do this, you basically prevent yourself from editing it in the older version and this can almost lock you out of that work, if lets say you haven’t upgraded you tableau server in line with Tableau 10. And so a way to avoid that is to basically re-install the version that you would like to be the default again. And you can actually get the download files from the internet. If you just go to Google and type in “Alternate Download Site Tableau” it brings you to this page and you have all previous version of Tableau, you can download them and then basically you just keep these files somewhere on your machine, so I’ve brought the file onto my desktop in this particular case, this is Tableau 9.3.2 and when I double click that and run the installation, I get this sort of different setup screen, it actually asks me If I want to modify my setup and If I click repair instead of uninstall, then it runs through the installation process again, it basically looks through all the files and it edits the registry for me to make 9.3.2 the default version. And so if we just let this complete, and as you see it’s complete, it’s put a new shortcut on my desktop so that’s how I know that process id done and now when I double click the workbook, it opens it by default in the version that I want to use day in day out for production and that’s really handy, because you can still partake in testing the betas and if you need to use the version that isn’t your daily driver, then you can basically open that separately and then open your workbook manually. You still have to make sure that you don’t save as an older (*newer) version, but otherwise that’s it. It’s a very neat way of making sure you can use two versions of Tableau, maybe even more but keeping one version as your default. That’s it !
Published 11 Jun 2016
