Issue
Tableau Desktop can not publish to earlier versions of Tableau Server.Because of this, Admins with a particular server version do not want their Tableau Desktop authors to upgrade past that version, but some upgrades still occur.
This requires two sets of steps as there are two places Tableau Desktop sends upgrade messaging. The auto-update will pop up a dialogue box during startup if new versions are detected as being available. And the Discover panel may contain an "Update to X.X Now" banner at the bottom.
Disable Auto-Update Pop-ups at Startup
Option 1: Select Help > Settings and Performance > Disable Automatic Product Updates
Option 2: install tableau with auto-updates turned off (see the following Tableau Help document: Control Product Updates for Tableau Desktop)
Disable Auto-Updates in the Discover Pane
Open Notepad or other text editting software.
Open the Preferences.tps file in the Tableau Repository (by default this is located at C:\Users\{user name}\Documents\My Tableau Repository)
Add following line after the <preferences> line:
<preference name="ui.discoverpane.show" value="false"/>
It should look something like this:
<?xml version='1.0'?> <workbook> <preferences> <preference name="ui.discoverpane.show" value="false"/> … </preferences> </workbook>
Save the changes to the file.