When the business needs to view Tableau dashboards or visualizations in SharePoint 2010, the most complete solution is to install the Tableau Server Service Application into the SharePoint farm. But what if it is not installed or supported on the farm?

The most obvious workaround is to add a Page Viewer web part to a SharePoint page which points to the URL of the Tableau dashboard page. This method shows the entire Tableau page – navigation header, footer and everything else in-between. But who really wants a page in a page, unless it’s the only option?

To display just the dashboard itself on a SharePoint page, use a Content Editor Web Part. Click the “Share” hyperlink on the Tableau dashboard page, and a dialog is displayed with Email and Embed code strings.

The Embed string in the dialog contains object and param tags:

Just copy and paste them into the HTML Source pane of the Content Editor Web Part.

Finish configuring the web part settings and publish the page to view the Tableau dashboard. Depending on network, server and dashboard conditions, the report may take a few seconds to load at times, but it works.

After publishing the page, it is possible to replace the “Embed” code in the HTML Source Editor code, but SharePoint 2010 makes it a bit tricky. In my case, it took clicking on the content area and hitting the delete key a couple of times to remove a veneer of sorts before the “Edit HTML Source” button would apply to the correct web part on the page. If that fails to satisfy, just create a new Content Editor Web Part to replace the previous one.