Developer

Getting data from external APIs into Tableau often involves several workarounds —manual extracts, middle-ware scripts, or writing to a database. This isn’t bad per se, but if you just want real time data from an API, Table Extensions are a clean and direct solution.

Table Extensions allow you to connect Tableau directly to external data sources like APIs using Python, R, or other analytics engines. This means you can fetch live data—whether it’s weather updates, currency exchange rates, or stock prices—and use it as if it were a regular data source in Tableau.

In this post, I’ll walk you through how to set up your first Table Extension, use Python to pull live data (without storing anything), and explore the benefits and best practices of using this approach—especially when working with real-time or short-lived data.