I love the Google Finance dashboards to keep tabs on my favorite stock (NYSE: DATA) and while I have certainly copied this layout for many of my dashboards I was always jelous how they were able to embed that sexy news feed to the right of the trends. For years I have pondered just how one might accomplish such a monumental task. Well, today my friends, you are in luck as I have climbed the mountain and drank from the fountain and it is sweet. Lucky for you I am here to share with you my new found knowledge. Enjoy and stay thirsty (for data) my friends!
How to embed a Google News feed into your Tableau Dashboards
- Setup a web server somewhere. I used the WAMP server install package to setup an additional web server on my already existing Tableau Server (download WAMP here)
- Once I had that going I copied the files found here (tableau-news-embed) to a new directory on my WAMP server.
- I then added a web page object to my Tableau dashboard with the URL parameters like so “http://myserver.com/?q=firefox+os&num=5”. In this example the parameter ‘q' is my search term, which can be passed in using dashboard actions, and ‘num' is the number of articles to show.
- (optional) You can now have this defaulted to a specific search or you can create a URL action in your Tableau dashboard to automatically change the news feed based on some user action. This is what I have setup below, when you pick a company name it passes that to the news.html page and updates accordingly.
- Revel in your accomplishments…
Here is a Google News Feed embedded into a Tableau Workbook
Feel free to download the workbook and checkout the dashboard actions on how exactly I did this
Here's a step-by-step video on how to add Google News to your Tableau Dashboards
Very innovative use of Tableau dashboard web page objects, & a great video tutorial as well. Great stuff.
Hey Ben — This post gave me the idea of incorporating a Twitter feed into the Iron Viz contest at this week’s Tableau Customer Conference. Thanks! Instead of using a web server, I put the HTML / JS page onto Amazon S3, made it public and used the Amazon URL to incorporate the viz into Tableau. (I think you could do something similar with GitHub pages.)
I’ll keep the pages up if anyone wants to play around w/o setting up the server:
tools.tableaubyexample.com/twitter.html // Twitter feed with support for widget ID and Twitter API options.
tools.tableaubyexample.com/twitter_tcc13.html // Minimal embed code with hard-coded Twitter options.
tools.tableaubyexample.com/news.html // Your news feed code.
Thanks again for the great tip and excellent blog in general—it’s a must read for me.
Jim
Thanks Jim! I did think that looked familiar when you were building it 😉
This is a great walk-through – I’ve used a similar technique to embed D3.Js on Tableau Dashboards. Thanks again for putting this together.
Can I embed a webpage that need credentials to display in this method?
Great post and technique, Ben. Thank you! It came very handy for my latest project. I have one question. In my news feed web object links open in the same window (in Tableau). How can I force them to open in a new browser window?