Likelihood to Recommend Tableau Desktop is one the finest tool available in the market with such a wide range of capabilities in its suite that makes it easy to generate insights. Further, if optimally designed, then its reports are fairly simple to understand, yet capable enough to make changes at the required levels. One can create a variety of visualizations as required by the business or the clients. The data pipelines in the backend are very robust. The tableau desktop also provides options to develop the reports in developer mode, which is one of the finest features to embed and execute even the most complex possible logic. It's easier to operate, simple to navigate, and fluent to understand by the users.
Read full review Appropriate for general querying and some DBA work. It's the universal least-offensive solution for most environments - not best of breed, but not subject to unusual/extensive requirements. It just works. On the other hand, some functionality (e.g. data import/export, snippets) are perfunctory and minimal and seem to be either difficult or impossible to automate. If you need to streamline those operations, you'll be forced to rely on third-party solutions that mostly work on top of (instead of with) TOAD.
Read full review Pros An excellent tool for data visualization, it presents information in an appealing visual format—an exceptional platform for storing and analyzing data in any size organization. Through interactive parameters, it enables real-time interaction with the user and is easy to learn and get support from the community. Read full review Export data into excel. Export data into excel using a pivot table functionality. Navigation between windows is intuitive and easy to understand. Good for SQL novices and experts alike. Read full review Cons Formatting the data to work correctly in graphical presentations can be time consuming Daily data extracts can run slowly depending on how much data is required and the source of the data The desktop version is required for advanced functionality, editing on [the] Tableau server allows only limited features Read full review The workflow is a relatively new feature. Quest is adding additional functionality and the workflows are useful now. Would be nice if the 'Automate' feature was a bit easier to use. Would be nice if some of the SQL Editor features in the traditional interface worked better in the new workflow interface (although, these are being fixed with each release). Would be nice if there were fewer releases. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Our use of Tableau Desktop is still fairly low, and will continue over time. The only real concern is around cost of the licenses, and I have mentioned this to Tableau and fully expect the development of more sensible models for our industry. This will remove any impediment to expansion of our use.
Read full review Usability Tableau Desktop has proven to be a lifesaver in many situations. Once we've completed the initial setup, it's simple to use. It has all of the features we need to quickly and efficiently synthesize our data. Tableau Desktop has advanced capabilities to improve our company's data structure and enable self-service for our employees.
Read full review I find Toad Data Point easy to use for both the novice and the experienced business analyst. If all you desire is to access data and create spreadsheets...this is a snap. Toad Data Point actually has cool data analysis features built into it. The newer workflow interface makes automating steps a snap
Read full review Reliability and Availability When used as a stand-alone tool, Tableau Desktop has unlimited uptime, which is always nice. When used in conjunction with Tableau Server, this tool has as much uptime as your server admins are willing to give it. All in all, I've never had an issue with Tableau's availability.
Read full review Performance Tableau Desktop's performance is solid. You can really dig into a large dataset in the form of a spreadsheet, and it exhibits similarly good performance when accessing a moderately sized Oracle database. I noticed that with Tableau Desktop 9.3, the performance using a spreadsheet started to slow around 75K rows by about 60 columns. This was easily remedied by creating an extract and pushing it to Tableau Server, where performance went to lightning fast
Read full review Support Rating I have never really used support much, to be honest. I think the support is not as user-friendly to search and use it. I did have an encounter with them once and it required a bit of going back and forth for licensing before reaching a resolution. They did solve my issue though
Read full review In-Person Training It is admittedly hard to train a group of people with disparate levels of ability coming in, but the software is so easy to use that this is not a huge problem; anyone who can follow simple instructions can catch up pretty quickly.
Read full review Online Training The training for new users are quite good because it covers topic wise training and the best part was that it also had video tutorials which are very helpful
Read full review Implementation Rating Again, training is the key and the company provides a lot of example videos that will help users discover use cases that will greatly assist their creation of original visualizations. As with any new software tool, productivity will decline for a period. In the case of Tableau, the decline period is short and the later gains are well worth it.
David Fickes Decision Sciences - Modeling, Simulation & Analysis
Read full review Alternatives Considered If we do not have legacy tools which have already been set up, I would switch the visualization method to open source software via
PyCharm ,
Atom , and
Visual Studio IDE . These IDEs cannot directly help you to visualize the data but you can use many python packages to do so through these IDEs.
Read full review Although Toad and
UltraEdit are both great products, from an SQL standpoint Toad is a much better editor and troubleshooter.
Read full review Scalability Tableau Desktop's scaleability is really limited to the scale of your back-end data systems. If you want to pull down an extract and work quickly in-memory, in my application it scaled to a few tens of millions of rows using the in-memory engine. But it's really only limited by your back-end data store if you have or are willing to invest in an optimized SQL store or purpose-built query engine like Veritca or Netezza or something similar.
Read full review Return on Investment Tableau was acquired years ago, and has provided good value with the content created. Ongoing maintenance costs for the platform, both to maintain desktop and server licensing has made the continuing value questionable when compared to other offerings in the marketplace. Users have largely been satisfied with the content, but not with the overall performance. This is due to a combination of factors including the performance of the Tableau engines as well as development deficiencies. Read full review It is the least common denominator - not particularly optimized for our environment or workflows. Hangs or slowdowns add anywhere from 5% - 7% for projects utilizing large/complicated data setts. (This could be due to other IT-imposed constraints and not entirely due to TOAD.) Trying to perform some operations requires reading documentation and experimenting in order to figure out the TOAD-specific approaches and commands. It just works (when we understand it). Updates don't break things and things don't suddenly start behaving differently. Best of all, we don't mysteriously lose functionality. Read full review ScreenShots