Tableau - a fantastic product for delivering modern business intelligence
Updated May 24, 2016
Tableau - a fantastic product for delivering modern business intelligence
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Tableau Desktop
We just recently implemented Tableau here at Experticity and we've been having generally good experiences with it thus far. We're currently moving towards making Tableau the primary system for people throughout the company to consume data we provide. Tableau's dashboards make it easy for us to visualize what is going on with our business; the product has been great for speedy dashboard development and interactivity in terms of the capabilities users have in interacting with the dashboards via Tableau server.
- Rapid dashboard development. Tableau makes it extremely easy to visualize data in a multitude of ways and combine related pieces into a visually appealing dashboard for business users.
- Support for a wide array of data sources, the ability to blend or join data from disparate sources together.
- A large number of built-in chart and graph types to help users visualize data.
- global filters to quickly slice and dice data sets by whatever dimensions or metrics you desire.
- We have issues with Tableau calculating different attributes on date dimensions. Because of this, we've had to manually add additional fields to our date dimensional tables to support year over year reporting.
- Tableau server doesn't currently have support for business users creating their own calculated measures. This would be an extremely useful feature, especially for the users who we consider "power" users that want to perform further analysis on the reports the BI team provides.
- The live data streams seem to add a lot of overhead and really hinder the "interactivity" portion of the dashboards. Because of this, we've stuck mainly to using data extracts to ensure the dashboard interactivity is responsive.
In comparison to Tableau, the other dashboarding/BI tools I've used feel clunky, are very slow to develop in, and seem to lack features of a more modernized tool like Tableau. In Pentaho Analyzer, for instance, trying to include multiple worksheets or reports in a single dashboard seems to be an overwhelming task. In Tableau, combining a bunch of different reports into a dashboard (and also enabling global filters) is an extremely easy action--and it isn't hard to make a Tableau dashboard look very professional and appealing.