# Personal access token (PAT) admin control  | New in Tableau 2023.2

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2023-08-14
- **Format:** Video · 5 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Tool strategy, Analytics
- **Tools:** Tableau (cloud, server)
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/personal-access-token-pat-admin-control-new-in-tableau-2023-2
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGgrAPLO5ok

I walk through the new admin controls for personal access tokens (PATs) added in Tableau 2023.2. I explain what PATs are, show how to create and revoke one, and demonstrate the new site-level settings admins can use to govern them.

## Key takeaways

- Personal access tokens are long-lived authentication tokens that let users sign into the Tableau REST API without hard-coded username and password credentials, each consisting of a name, key and secret.
- You create a PAT under account settings, where it's assigned an expiration date and a copyable secret that only you should know — and can be revoked instantly.
- Admins can now enable or disable PAT creation site-wide, or restrict the ability to specific user groups for better oversight.
- Admins can set an expiration period for tokens (180 days by default) to align with enterprise password cycle policies.
- There's still no built-in interface to audit all created tokens or their usage, though some of this is available via Postgres repository data or Tableau's auditing capabilities.

## Chapters

- 0:11 What are personal access tokens
- 1:12 Creating and revoking a token
- 1:48 New admin management settings
- 2:52 Setting expiration periods
- 3:16 Wishlist: auditing token usage

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/personal-access-token-pat-admin-control-new-in-tableau-2023-2

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just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena