TEXTWRANGLER FOR MAC OS X
TEXTWRANGLER INSTALL

This entry was posted in Tips and Techniques and tagged 7-zip, BBEdit, text editor, TextWrangler, version, XML on Jby Jonathan Drummey. Also, if you’d like to change the version of the file you can edit that yourself, or (if you’re ok running the workbook XML through a web-based tool) using Jeffrey Shaffer’s Tableau File Conversion Utility. This will easily save me hours over the course of a year, thanks, Shawn! There’s also a feature request for making version-checking easier that you can vote up. Like BBEdit, TextWrangler is not a word processor and so lacks formatting and style options it is limited to. It was originally a commercial product, but (beginning with version 2.0) has become the freeware alternative to their flagship editor, BBEdit, and the successor to their previous freeware editor, BBEdit Lite.

TEXTWRANGLER FOR MAC OS X

Drag the TWBX to the BBEdit or TextWrangler icon. TextWrangler is a text editor for Mac OS X from Bare Bones Software.

It turns out I can just drag the TWBX onto the BBEdit icon on the dock and BBEdit will open up the zip file: I use BBEdit for my text editor (BareBones also offers a free text editor called TextWrangler that can do the same thing) and BBEdit natively supports zip files.

That inspired me to figure out an equivalent on the Mac.

TEXTWRANGLER INSTALL

Right-click on the TWBX and choose 7-Zip->Open Archive. TextWrangler is a free text editor for Mac OS X, the free little brother to the much more expensive (and, it must be said, much more feature-filled) BBEdit.It's a great text editor in its own right, however, and in particular it's good to install if your needs aren't great or if you want to test it out before graduating to BBEdit.Shawn pointed out a shortcut on Windows using the free 7-Zip application that only takes a few seconds, here’s a demo: twbx (Tableau Packaged Workbook) is stored as a zip file so I’ve always just opened workbooks up in different versions of Tableau until I found the right one or once in awhile took the time to fire up a zip application, extract the TWBX to a folder and then looked at the. twb (Tableau Workbook) file, in particular the version attribute of the tag, and we can open up the XML in any old text editor, I’ve highlighted the tag that shows this workbook was created in version 9.1:

The basis for this technique is that the version of the Tableau workbook is stored in the XML of the. I shared this problem in a Tableau Zen Master email thread and Shawn Wallwork replied with his trick for Windows that only takes a few seconds, and I was able to take that and come up with one for the Mac as well. And I’m often frustrated because I’ll open the workbook in the wrong version of Tableau and get this message:Īnd then I have to open it up in other versions which can take awhile. In helping other Tableau users as part of DataBlick or my pro-bono contributions to the community I get a lot of Tableau workbooks in a lot of versions, in the last two weeks I’ve received v8.3, v9.0, v9.2, v9.3, and v10beta workbooks and when I edit them I need to make sure I’m using the same version of Tableau.

Textwrangler