Build Smartsheet Visualizations in Tableau Desktop

About Smartsheet Data Integration

CData provides the easiest way to access and integrate live data from Smartsheet. Customers use CData connectivity to:

Read and write attachments, columns, comments and discussions.

View the data in individuals cells, report on cell history, and more.

Perform Smartsheet-specific actions like deleting or downloading attachments, creating, copying, deleting, or moving sheets, and moving or copying rows to another sheet.

Users frequently integrate Smartsheet with analytics tools such as Tableau, Crystal Reports, and Excel. Others leverage our tools to replicate Smartsheet data to databases or data warehouses.

Getting Started

CData Connect Cloud provides a pure SQL Server, cloud-to-cloud interface for Smartsheet, allowing you to easily build visualizations from live Smartsheet data in Tableau without installing connectors. As you build visualizations, Tableau generates SQL queries to gather data. Using optimized data processing out of the box, CData Connect Cloud pushes all supported SQL operations (filters, JOINs, etc) directly to Smartsheet, leveraging server-side processing to quickly return Smartsheet data.

Configure Smartsheet Connectivity for Tableau

Connectivity to Smartsheet from Tableau is made possible through CData Connect Cloud. To work with Smartsheet data from Tableau, we start by creating and configuring a Smartsheet connection.

Log into Connect Cloud, click Connections and click Add Connection

Select "Smartsheet" from the Add Connection panel

Enter the necessary authentication properties to connect to Smartsheet.

Smartsheet uses the OAuth authentication standard. To authenticate using OAuth, you will need to register an app to obtain the OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and CallbackURL connection properties.

However, for testing purposes you can instead use the Personal Access Token you get when you create an application; set this to the OAuthAccessToken connection property.

Configuring a connection (Salesforce is shown)

Click Create & Test

Navigate to the Permissions tab in the Add Smartsheet Connection page and update the User-based permissions.

Add a Personal Access Token

If you are connecting from a service, application, platform, or framework that does not support OAuth authentication, you can create a Personal Access Token (PAT) to use for authentication. Best practices would dictate that you create a separate PAT for each service, to maintain granularity of access.

Click on your username at the top right of the Connect Cloud app and click User Profile.

On the User Profile page, scroll down to the Personal Access Tokens section and click Create PAT.

Give your PAT a name and click Create.

The personal access token is only visible at creation, so be sure to copy it and store it securely for future use.

With the connection configured, you are ready to connect to Smartsheet data from Tableau.

Visualize Live Smartsheet Data in Tableau

To establish a connection from Tableau Desktop to the CData Connect Cloud Virtual SQL Server API, follow these steps.

In Tableau Desktop, open a new book. Under To a Server, select More, then Microsoft SQL Server.

Selecting Microsoft SQL Server as the connection type.

Enter your credentials:

Server: enter the Virtual SQL Server endpoint and port separated by a comma: tds.cdata.com,14333
Database: enter the Connection Name of the CData Connect Cloud data source you want to connect to (for example, Smartsheet1).
Authentication: select Use a specific username and password.
Username: enter your CData Connect Cloud username. This is displayed in the top-right corner of the CData Connect Cloud interface. For example, [email protected].
Password: enter the PAT you previously generated.
Require SSL: leave this selected.

Configuring the connection to the Virtual SQL Server API.

Click Sign In.

Select the Database (Connect Cloud connection) you wish to work with and opt for a Live or Extract Connection type.

Select the table(s) you wish to visualize. If you select multiple tables, define the relationship between the tables using the appropriate columns.

Selecting tables to visualize (Salesforce is shown)

Select the fields to visualize.

Visualizing live data (Salesforce is shown).

Real-Time Access to Smartsheet Data from Data Applications

At this point, you have a direct, cloud-to-cloud connection to live Smartsheet data from your Tableau workbook. You can create new visualizations, build dashboards, and more. For more information on gaining live access to data from more than 100 SaaS, Big Data, and NoSQL sources from applications like Tableau, refer to our Connect Cloud page.