Publishing to Tableau Server Response Code 403 Workaround

When publishing a workbook to Tableau Server, you may experience one of the following issues:

• You are unable to publish a workbook to your preferred site in Tableau Server.
• You see a “You do not have permission to perform the requested operation. Response code: 403. Details from Server: Sorry, you do not have permissions to publish to this project. You are an Administrator, no do you have the Publishing right, nor do you have Project Leader permission on the project ‘Default’” error message.

These issues occur because you are publishing a workbook, which was created with an earlier version of Tableau Desktop, to the latest version of Tableau Server. Workbooks created with an earlier version of Tableau Desktop have limited capabilities when publishing to the latest version of Tableau Server.  For example, although you have permissions to both the “Default” site and other sites on Tableau Server, you are limited to publishing only to the default site because the workbook was created with an earlier version of Tableau Desktop. If you do not have permissions to publish to the “Default” site, you will see the above error message.

To resolve this issue, Tableau recommends upgrading to the latest version of Tableau Desktop to take advantage of the many new features included in the latest version of Tableau Server. For more information about workbook compatibility between different versions of Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server, refer to the Desktop and Server Compatibility article.