Customising the Start Screen Accelerator Workbooks

Ahh, the Accelerator Workbooks (Sample Workbooks in pre 2023 versions) section that appears at the bottom of the Start Screen:

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Wouldn’t it be nice if this could be customised to show five of workbooks of your choosing.

Maybe you’re not interested in seeing the Tableau Samples; or maybe your company has several showcase workbooks. Maybe you would like to use this as a starting point for templates using company designs it would like you to use instead; or even, pre-populated workbooks to published resources.

Tableau have a help article to guide you through the process. Unfortunately however, following this requires very specific changes to the registry that need to be carried-out for each install, something that most users will neither want to do, nor have the permissions to do.

Fortunately, the process can be easily simplified, with just a couple of changes to the files in the directory.

The help article explains that a manifest file (which is just an xml file) is generated by Tableau when the samples (accelerators) directory is rebuilt, so by editing the existing manifest, you can easily make those changes.

To add workbooks to this section, you will need the workbook, and a png image to act as the thumbnail, although this can be quite large.

You will need a text editor to edit the manifest file which is just an xml file; so even Windows Notepad should be sufficient. 

Finally, the directory, which in Windows, is your Tableau install directory defaulted to Program Files:

For this to work, the above items need to be stored into the above directory, and this needs to be updated for each version update. Furthermore, this directory needs administrator privileges to make changes.

Obviously, this isn’t always useful, although you could keep this directory fixed to a different location or even a network folder by using Symbolic Links.

And finally, you’ll need to edit the “samples.manifest” file to match the preceding objects.

For example, adding the HRExpense accelerator from the en-US version to the en-GB version (yup, those locale folders do contain other workbooks, check them out), all you need to do is copy the workbook and its thumbnail image to your en-GB folder, and then update the manifest:

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Becomes:

Finally, a quick save and reloading Tableau:

And we see our newly added workbook.

Removal is just as easy as editing the manifest, and being an xml, its possible to comment-out instead of complete removal: