The other day I was working on a re-design of a dashboard, taking it from using extracts to using a live connection and making some other design changes that would speed the dashboard up.  Naturally I wanted both workbooks open at the same time so that I could work on the new one while maintaining all of the design of the first one.

The packaged workbook is 1.4GB, which basically never finishes downloading from Tableau Server, so you have to get the original author to give it to you on a memory stick.  That’s another problem for another day.  I opened the workbook and saved it under another name so that I would have two copies.  Great!

Then I need to open the original workbook again so that I could see them together.  Then…POOF!…Tableau couldn’t open the workbook because it said I didn’t have enough space on my hard drive.  Huh?  How can I not have enough space if I was able to save the workbook and I clearly have space on my hard drive?

With a bit of research, I was able to locate a TableauTemp folder I never knew existed. It’s located here: C:\Users\<your_name>\AppData\Local\Temp\TableauTemp

Low and behold, there are tons and tons of folders and files in the folder, which totaled over 16GB.  Seriously!  Go ahead, check yours.