Moving to Tableau Cloud? Here's Your Personal Migration Checklist

So your IT team just migrated your company's Tableau setup from an on-premise server to Tableau Cloud. Cool! You're now on Tableau's fully managed analytics platform, which means less server headaches for your admin team.

But here's the thing: some of your personal settings and customizations didn't make the jump automatically. Think of it like moving to a new apartment—the furniture comes with you, but you still need to reconnect the Wi-Fi and set up your streaming accounts.

Don't worry, most of these tasks take just a few minutes. Let's walk through what needs your attention.

What Actually Needs to Be Recreated?

When Tableau content gets migrated, the core stuff—your workbooks, dashboards, and data connections—transfers over. But personalized settings and certain configurations need to be manually set up again on the new platform. It's not ideal, but it's a one-time thing.

Pro tip: Keep both your old Tableau Server and new Tableau Cloud access open in different browser tabs while you work through this. Makes copying things over way easier.

Your Quick Action Items

Subscriptions and Alerts

Remember those email subscriptions you set up to get weekly dashboard updates? Yeah, those didn't transfer. You'll need to resubscribe to your favorite views and workbooks on the Cloud site. Just navigate to the content you want, click the subscribe button, and choose your schedule. Takes about 30 seconds per subscription.

Custom Views and Filters

If you created custom views—basically saved versions of dashboards with your specific filters and selections applied—you'll need to recreate those. Open the original view, apply your filters again, and save it as a custom view. 👉 Find the best infrastructure for hosting your analytics workloads with high-performance dedicated servers

Favorites Need a Fresh Start

Your carefully curated favorites list? Gone. You'll need to star everything again. The good news is this gives you a chance to clean house and only favorite the stuff you actually use regularly.

URL Actions Require Updates

Any dashboard actions that linked to specific Tableau Server URLs need updating. You'll need to swap those old server addresses with the new Tableau Cloud URLs. If you're using field variables in your URLs, those might need adjusting too.

Saved Credentials for Data Sources

This one's important: any data sources where you previously saved login credentials will need those credentials re-entered. Tableau doesn't migrate saved passwords for security reasons (which makes sense when you think about it). Go through your published data sources and flows, and update the authentication info.

The Technical Stuff Your Admin Might Handle

Some items require coordination with your Tableau administrator, especially if they involve organization-wide settings.

Dashboard Extensions

If your dashboards use extensions—those add-ons that bring extra functionality—they might need reconfiguration for the Cloud environment. Your admin may need to enable extension support on the new site first.

Embedded Dashboards

Got Tableau views embedded in other applications, like your company intranet or a custom web app? Those embedding solutions need updating to point to Tableau Cloud instead of the old server. This includes authentication methods and content URLs.

Row-Level Security

If your dashboards use row-level security based on user or group names, those mappings might need updating. User and group identifiers can change during migration, which could affect who sees what data.

Advanced Features to Reconfigure

Ask Data Lenses

These focused data exploration tools need to be rebuilt on Cloud. If you created custom lenses to help teammates explore specific datasets, you'll need to recreate those configurations.

Webhooks

Any webhooks you set up for automated notifications or integrations won't transfer. You'll need to recreate these in the Tableau Cloud environment with the new endpoint URLs.

Collections

If you organized content into collections for easy access, those need to be rebuilt manually. Think of it as reorganizing your bookmarks.

Data Management Features

For organizations with Data Management capabilities, data quality warnings and field descriptions need to be reapplied. These annotations help keep everyone on the same page about data reliability and meaning.

Making the Transition Smooth

Don't try to tackle everything at once. Start with the features you use daily—probably subscriptions, favorites, and custom views. The more specialized stuff like webhooks and extensions can wait until you actually need them.

Keep a list as you go. When you encounter something that doesn't work quite right, jot it down and address it when you have time. Most users find they only need to recreate 3-4 things from this entire list.

And honestly? This migration might be a blessing in disguise. It's the perfect opportunity to clean up old subscriptions you don't read anymore, delete custom views you never use, and streamline your Tableau experience. 👉 Ensure reliable uptime for your cloud analytics with enterprise-grade server solutions

The Tableau Cloud platform brings some real advantages—automatic updates, better scalability, and less maintenance overhead for your IT team. Once you get through this initial setup, you probably won't think about the migration again.

If something's not working or you're stuck on a particular feature, reach out to your Tableau administrator. They're dealing with the same migration on a larger scale and probably have solutions ready to go.