Tableau is the preferred data analytics and visualization tool at HMS. It is a powerful tool for exploring data and visually presenting it. Tableau can also pull and combine data from most sources, such as Excel, data warehouses and web data connectors.

Types of users

  • Creator – You intend to create your own content. Depending on your use case, we can also enable you to publish and share content on our Tableau Server. Whether you are looking to report on data in the Delphi Data Warehouse or plug into your spreadsheets, we can support you in getting started.
  • Viewer – do not need to create dashboards but would like to access a Tableau dashboard published by someone else. 

Getting started

  • Review the Tableau licensing policy. If you qualify for a license, contact the HMS IT Data Architecture (DA) team at data_architecture@hms.harvard.edu.
  • Once the requirements are understood, the DA team delivers data to Tableau Creators in the form of Tableau Data Sources which refresh nightly. Data is drawn from the Delphi Data Warehouse, which contains a broad and deep collection of data from most of the Administrative and Education systems at HMS.
  • For Tableau Publishers, the DA team can provision access for your users and assist with the setup of role-based data access as required.
  • If your department does not have any Tableau Creators and you need a dashboard, contact the DA team, data_architecture@hms.harvard.edu. We'll work with you to establish your requirements, so we can best assist you.

Training resources

The DA Team also supports several other Business Intelligence tools, which are more suitable for certain applications. Contact the Data Architecture team and we can help to evaluate your use case and recommend the best tool.