Use Tableau Packaged Workbook to share your work with others while using a snippet of a large database; Use Tableau Workbook when it is important to update data frequently and have a single master/few data source for different visualizations.
A packaged workbook is a package of files that compressed together as a single zip file that includes the data source file, TWB and any other files that used to produce that package workbook. It can be unpackaged easily either by changing the file extension to .zip and unzipped it or right click to unpackage as shown in the image below.
The output of the unpackaged TWBX:
The packaged Workbook is intended for sharing. When you connect to data that is a file source, and when you save your workbook as a TWBX, Tableau essentially creates a copy of your data file (Tableau extract, Excel, etc.) and adds all the other files used in your workbook and packages them together.
This makes TWBX shareable and easy to maintain, since you don't have to specify file paths to all the necessary files for the workbook. However, since it includes all data sources in its format, it can get very large, especially if you have many rows of data. Another thing is that is you would like to update the data being used in your packaged workbook, you have to manually do a refresh.
If you care about updating your data source constantly, or if you connect to a large data source, you may not want to get a snapshot of that large data source. Then the standard TWB format may be a better option for you. TWB is just an XML file that contains the structure of the visualizations, dashboard, fields, etc. that you created using the data source at hand. As you can see on the image below, it contains the information where the data source is located and other information related to the data or visualizations you have created, hence the file is usually very lean and unlikely to exceed 1MB.
