He stands at the podium and proclaims with a sense of otherworldly serenity ‘it just WORKS!’. A friendly wink, an embarrassed half grin and a subtle nod in the direction of the competition and the message is clear. You’re one of us now brother. While THEY suffer needless complexity YOU will enjoy effortless analytics.

Sorry folks. It’s not that easy. Tableau does a lot for you, but there are still a few things you have to do for yourself. Grunt work. Have no fear though, even here Tableau has your back. If you find yourself tagged with the unenviable title ‘administrator’ … we’re here to help. Let me introduce you to tabcmd.exe.

tabcmd is a command line tool that comes with Tableau Server. You can use tabcmd to automate many of the routine user, group and project related tasks that you need to stay on top of to keep Tableau Server happy. Before we can benefit from tabcmd (we’ll talk about that a lot in future posts), we need it install it. The tabcmd installer can be found in the Extras folder of your Tableau Server. In the screenshot below (source), you can see the full path to the extras folder for a Tableau Server 6 install. Future versions will have a similar folder structure.

Double click the installer and tabcmd.exe will be installed to the bin subfolder of your Tableau Server folder tree. Shift + Right Click on your bin folder and select ‘Open command window here’ to open a command window and begin working with tabcmd.

I’d like to hear how you’re using tabcmd, share your stories in the comments.