No doubt you have noticed when putting a message into a Tableau subscription in the actual email it comes out as one long string.
No matter how you format the text in the Tableau subscription message box it comes out differently in the actual email. However there is a solution to improve the Tableau subscription message formatting. HTML.
(NOTE apparently Tableau Server 2020 no longer accepts HTML in the subscription message; see the comments for details.)
The Tableau subscription message can be formatted with simple HTML!
Format your tableau subscription with HTML
This enables many formatting options of Tableau subscription messages including:
- New lines
- Bullet points
- Bolding
- Underline
- Adding links
Consider the following text:
You can format Tableau subscription emails using HTML. You can have:
- new lines
- bullet points
- bold
- underline
Please contact TAR Solutions for further info
Using the subscription box user interface, where you can’t include bullet points, the above message in a subscription email would be:
You can format Tableau subscription emails using HTML. You can have:new linesbullet pointsboldunderlinePlease contact TAR Solutions for further info
Adding a bit of HTML to the message in the Tableau subscription message creating box transforms this message to how it’s wanted. Try the following:
You can format Tableau subscription emails using HTML. You can have:
<br>
<ul>
<li>new lines</li>
<li>bullet points</li>
<li><b>bold</b></li>
<li><u>underline</u></li>
</ul>
<br>
Please contact <a href=[email protected]>TAR Solutions</a> for further info
We’ve even added a link enabling the contact email to become a single click for the user.
Using the mailto functionality you could customise the Tableau subscription message even further for the user, adding things such as an email subject to the email link, for example.
This does not work. Seems that message subscriptions do not accept HTML.
Subscription messages do accept html. I have done this many times. Therefore something perhaps isn’t quite right in your html? Perhaps it’s not entered in the right place?
Subscriptions in Tableau version 2020.1 does not accept html-code. We have had plenty of html-code in subscription messages but after an upgrade to 2020.1 from 2019.2 it does not work anymore. https://community.tableau.com/community/security-bulletins/blog/2020/01/23/important-adv-2020-007-html-injection-in-emails Might have something to do with this security bulletin from Tableau.
Thanks for sharing this information, I haven’t yet had chance to use subscriptions in server 2020, so this is useful to know. Potentially this was the issue also faced by Will.
Anyone figure out a workaround? All of my carefully crafted HTML messages blew up when we upgraded from 2019.1 to 2019.4. The message box now seems completely unformatible. Does something need to be done at the server level? This is a huge flaw in the upgrade and no one at Tableau seems to know or care.
I asked Tableau about this. This is the response I got “The ’email settings’ section will allow you to add a footer to subscriptions. Beyond that, we do not support custom subscription templates.”.
Full response on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TARSolsUK/status/1278583905822572544