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