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Tableau Desktop

Tableau Desktop

Overview

What is Tableau Desktop?

Tableau Desktop is a data visualization product from Tableau. It connects to a variety of data sources for combining disparate data sources without coding. It provides tools for discovering patterns and insights, data calculations, forecasts, and statistical summaries and visual…

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Recent Reviews

Analytics with Tableau

7 out of 10
February 27, 2024
We use Tableau to generate daily and weekly reports for our business module to generate our key performance indicators. These insights we …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 30 features
  • Report sharing and collaboration (156)
    9.3
    93%
  • Drill-down analysis (158)
    9.2
    92%
  • Customizable dashboards (165)
    9.0
    90%
  • Formatting capabilities (161)
    8.9
    89%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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Tableau Creator

$70.00

On Premise
Per User / Per Month

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttp://www.tableau.com/products/desktop

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Starting price (does not include set up fee)

  • $70 per month
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Product Demos

Tableau Desktop Tutorial | Tableau Desktop Training | Online Tableau Desktop Training - Youtube

YouTube

- Tableau Demo: Quick Tutorial to Getting Started with Tableau Desktop

YouTube

Tableau Desktop Naming Conventions Part 1

YouTube

Tableau Desktop Introduction Part 1

YouTube
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Features

BI Standard Reporting

Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.

8.5
Avg 8.2

Ad-hoc Reporting

Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.

8.9
Avg 8.1

Report Output and Scheduling

Ability to schedule and manager report output.

8.8
Avg 8.4

Data Discovery and Visualization

Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for patterns and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.

8.6
Avg 8.1

Access Control and Security

Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.

8.7
Avg 8.6

Mobile Capabilities

Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

8.4
Avg 8.0

Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding

APIs are a set of routines, protocols, and tools for used for embedding one application in another

8.6
Avg 7.9
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Product Details

What is Tableau Desktop?

Tableau Desktop supports data-driven decisions by helping users to answer questions more quickly, solve harder problems more easily, and uncover new insights.

Tableau Desktop connects directly to hundreds of data sources, both on-premises or in the cloud, with the goal of making it easier to start analyses. Interactive dashboards, drag and drop functionality, and natural language queries help users of all skill levels quickly discover actionable insights, all from its visual interface. Users can ask deeper questions by quickly building calculations, adding trend lines and seeing statistical summaries, or clustering data to see relationships.


Tableau Desktop Video

In this video, the TrustRadius team will be discussing the top business intelligence tools available: Qlik Sense, Tableau, ThoughtSpot, and IBM Cognos Analytics.

Tableau Desktop Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise
Operating SystemsWindows, Mac
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Tableau Desktop is a data visualization product from Tableau. It connects to a variety of data sources for combining disparate data sources without coding. It provides tools for discovering patterns and insights, data calculations, forecasts, and statistical summaries and visual storytelling.

Tableau Desktop starts at $70.

IBM Cognos Analytics, SAP Lumira Discovery, and Qlik Sense are common alternatives for Tableau Desktop.

Reviewers rate Report sharing and collaboration highest, with a score of 9.3.

The most common users of Tableau Desktop are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(2270)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-4 of 4)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Chandra Bhanu Pratap Singh | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using Tableau Desktop for creating dashboards for MIS reporting. These dashboards are being used by stakeholders and managers for their decisions process. They can see the changes over time and graphs, top performing agents and several similar details which are shown geographically or by state. We usually get requirements to update the dashboards as per their need so that it is easily understandable and conveys more information.
  • Graphs and charts are built very easily.
  • Tableau is very good at showing data visually
  • Easily help make a decision by looking at the pattern
  • The ETL part is missing in Tableau.
  • For huge and ambiguous data-sets, Tableau Desktop is not good.
  • Before analysis data preparation is mandatory.
Tableau is well suited for scenarios where we need to show data visually instead of tabular data. Because Tableau Desktop helps in summarizing the data, and summary data can be well presented in visual form only. If we have tabular data we need to first perform a few calculations and based on that we can create fields which will be used for creating graphs and charts.
1. As compared to SAP Business Objects, Tableau is very easy to use and quick in terms of implementation. Although SAP BO is reporting tool but both tool servers different purposes. SAP BO is a huge enterprises tool used mainly for creating large tabular reports while Tableau Desktop is a dash boarding tool used for visual representation of data.

2. When comparing QlikView with Tableau both are kind of similar tools, because the purpose of both tools are visual representation of data using dashboards. Although both tools are different at several points like QlikView has very good ETL and features compared to Tableau, while Tableau is very user-friendly and offers drag and drop features which makes it very easy for business users as well.
BI Platform
N/A
N/A
Supported Data Sources
N/A
N/A
BI Standard Reporting (3)
86.66666666666666%
8.7
Pixel Perfect reports
80%
8.0
Customizable dashboards
90%
9.0
Report Formatting Templates
90%
9.0
Ad-hoc Reporting (4)
95%
9.5
Drill-down analysis
90%
9.0
Formatting capabilities
100%
10.0
Integration with R or other statistical packages
90%
9.0
Report sharing and collaboration
100%
10.0
Report Output and Scheduling (5)
92%
9.2
Publish to Web
100%
10.0
Publish to PDF
100%
10.0
Report Versioning
100%
10.0
Report Delivery Scheduling
80%
8.0
Delivery to Remote Servers
80%
8.0
Data Discovery and Visualization (3)
93.33333333333334%
9.3
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
100%
10.0
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
90%
9.0
Predictive Analytics
90%
9.0
Access Control and Security (4)
82.5%
8.3
Multi-User Support (named login)
90%
9.0
Role-Based Security Model
80%
8.0
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
80%
8.0
Single Sign-On (SSO)
80%
8.0
Mobile Capabilities (3)
93.33333333333334%
9.3
Responsive Design for Web Access
100%
10.0
Mobile Application
80%
8.0
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
100%
10.0
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding (6)
15%
1.5
REST API
N/A
N/A
Javascript API
90%
9.0
iFrames
N/A
N/A
Java API
N/A
N/A
Themeable User Interface (UI)
N/A
N/A
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
N/A
N/A
QlikView, SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform
100
Most of they either prepare Tableau dashboards for their clients or they support tableau for their clients
3
In my own project we have three people who are providing tableau support
  • For their own Decision making process
  • For business forecast
  • For Reporting purpose
  • To see dynamic dashboards for visual analysis
  • For decision making process
  • Earlier we were using SAP Business Objects for reporting purpose in which even a little change takes up a lot of time, but now after moving to Tableau it has become quite easy and time saving.
Yes
Tableau replaced SAP Business Objects is my project, this was because for interactive visualization purpose business objects was not good, so we have to go for some visualization tool and Tableau was best to be considered due to its easy to use, less training and quick setup features and obviously business requirement.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
  • Analyst Reports
  • Third-party Reviews
The main factor in Purchasing tableau was its usability and quick setup, minimal training.
The evaluation and selection process would be kind of similar, although for big dataset I would like to choose some tool which uses in-memory technology for faster data retrieval.
  • Implemented in-house
Yes
Data Source and Data Preparation
Setting up 4 environments(Dev, Build, UAT and Prod)
Setting up connection and creating Tableau extracts
building dashboards
Publishing, Security and maintainance
Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled
This was very important part of the project, as it was an agile project the requirements for an update was frequent, so maintaining the projects change
requests were very important. So every request has to go through a change request and approval only after that the changes use to go live.
  • Several change requests were raised parallely so maintaing the que was getting difficult.
  • We have to come up with a change window only when changes could be applied.
  • We have to keep the timeline of changes so that it doesn't overlap with the previous request of the same dashboard.
Be very specific about the version of tableau desktop you are going to use since supporting version of tableau server also needs to set up.
  • Online training
  • Self-taught
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.
Without training also Tableau can be mastered by you will have to give more time to practice the concepts and also need to go through online resources.
No
Basically, Tableau has very good and active user community and any question are answered very quickly. Multiple times i had situations where i had to post on tableau community about my issues and community users were so active that I got 2-3 answers within 2 hrs.
Because I have never really faced any issue with the support team and they are usually quite active so it's quite helpful.
Yes
There was an issue publishing data online, in that case, contact support although that was not a bug.
During the time of setting up tableau online they were really helpful, I would say that was kind of exceptional support but it could have been faster.
  • Building basic charts from already available show me is one of the quickest and easiest thing in any BI tool
  • connecting to data is quite simple we don't need to write long queries(unless we want to).
  • arranging sheets in the dashboard and using filters are just clicks away, anyone can do it by first chance only.
  • Using calculated fields for special functionalities
  • Understanding and using LOD functions can be cumbersome for new users
  • building advanced graphs require a deep understanding of several advanced tableau features, which comes from regular uses.
Yes
The best thing is you can see your published content from a mobile client at your ease.
Apart from this tableau features mobile specific dashboard building, like based on mobile screen size and resolution you can create your dashboard.
I am really a fan of tableau for its quick setup, data connection, dashboard creation time and very easy to use UI.
As i have used multiple Bi tools like QlikView and SAP BO, i can say all other tools take really long time in performing above functionalities except QlikView which is really fast in term of performing analysis.
Although tableau is highly interactive and fast but with very large dataset its performance degrades heavily. So up to certain extent its really good but after that we have to take care of its performance issues.
I have really never faced any serious issue with this tool, although in some versions there were crashing issues were there.
The performance of tableau heavily depends on size of data and sheet objects and visualizations used. So yes the performance of tableau degrades based on its complexity.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Tableau is being used to retrieve data from multidimensional relational databases, spreadsheets and from cloud databases and then to present the data in visual format to the users in Sales, Marketing, Operations and Finance.
  • Tableau is being used for analyzing sales metrics, capturing web data from customers and used for marketing analytics, reporting financial analysis data to senior management to visualize the performance of the company within a few minutes, instead of tedious report generating processes from other third party applications.
  • We started using the latest version 8.0 and many of the features that we would be using were included in the latest release 8.0. Did not come across any areas that the product does less well, but we are somewhat new to Tableau and still trying out many features.
Tableau is one of the best analytics tools on the market; it's easy to implement, and work with and has many capabilities that analytics professionals like to use. The licensing costs are much lower than for a few other vendors out there, and affordable even for small businesses.
Oracle OBIEE.

The primary factors for choosing Tableau were the licensing costs; ability to view data from multiple data sources; the ease of infrastructure to setup; and ability for users to create and maintain their own worksheets without the need for IT assistance.

With Tableau it allows us to mesh data from various data sources from Salesforce, Oracle, Web and Engineering servers.
Tableau is very easy to implement and work with. Typically the skill set required would be someone from the finance reporting analytics group or a business analysts to develop and implement the key dashboards.

Unlike some other tools that rely more heavily on IT resources, Tableau Desktop is easy to setup and configure and saves IT costs.
6
Finance, Support, Operations, Sales and Marketing, and IT
1
With some training many of the users can start using the desktop, but advanced training is recommended for users to take advantage of the various functionality that Tableau provides.

Analyst with technical background in data model and architecture proves to be an advantage when defining new data sources and how to establish connections to different data sources to pull the data into Tableau for analysis.
  • We would be developing additional dashboards for supply chain to measure their metrics.
  • Financial Analytics.
  • Marketing and Sales Analytics.
  • Operations Analytics.
  • Engineering and Web Analytics.
  • We had setup and developed database on Amazon RDS to store data from web analytics from the engineering servers, and meshed the data with CRM data in Salesforce to determine the potential customers for our cloud product.
  • We had to create custom functions for the ones that Tableau did not have, and created views in Oracle database and used that as a source to publish analytics on Tableau.
Yes
We had replaced Oracle's discoverer and some adhoc SQL reporting from SQL development tools.

Oracle discoverer had become outdated and did not have the functionality to publish dashboards. Users needed the ability to have dashboard capabilities to view, modify or update the worksheets on the dashboard instantly without the need for IT assistance.

Users now have the capability to view the published dashboards that were periodically synced with the latest data and had to just refresh the page to view the latest data rather than having to refresh the sheet in discoverer that usually took very long to view the data.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
  • Third-party Reviews
Product usability was one of the biggest feature in selecting Tableau. Unlike Oracle's BI Solution that required IT help and days to create dashboards and publish those, with Tableau the users with minimal help had experience to publish their dashboards with their respective data sources within hours.

Users were able to create their own interactive sheets and publish those sheets for their teams to review the data. Along with the usability the price was also the factor in the decision.
We would keep the similar process that we had used to evaluate, but probably would include some of the newer or other software that are out in the market.
  • Implemented in-house
Yes
We took the new software implementation approach.

We evaluated the BI products to replace discoverer and adhoc reporting, and concentrated on financial reporting as the intial phase. We gathered the requirements for the financial reporting dashboard, and mapped the requirements with the Finance team. We had then designed the data model and views in Oracle, and had setup the data source on Tableau. Created the sheets and dashboard and published on the test instance of Tableau to review and refine the dashboard and finally had migrated the setups to the production instances.

We used the similar approach as above to publish dashboards for Sales and Marketing, Support cases and Engineering data.
Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled
With the experience with Change management we had been using within CRM and ERP implementations, we had rolled the change management for Tableau as well and was well-handled.
  • There was nothing major during the implementation, except Tableau had launched the newer version of the desktop and server during the implementation that had us upgrade and re-setup some of the configurations.
Installing the desktop was very easy. We downloaded the installation and went through the installation video prior to installation and then implemented it. I would recommend watching the online installation video prior to installation.

Tableau also has a user forum with most active and enthusiastic users out there who are always willing to help, and that would be a good source finding some key insights.
  • Online training
  • Self-taught
The training documents that are available online are very detailed and interactive. The instructors were very clear and concise in their presentations and demos and it was very easy to understand.
It would be better to have some training before starting to work with the tool. There are many advanced features available and they are all explained in the training videos and online documentation.

I would recommend going through the basics and then, once installed, it would be beneficial to go through the advanced training sessions and try them out.
Configurability is just right for now and is good for regular business users who would like to create their own sheets and reports, and does not need extensive technical skills to get off the ground with the usage.
No - we have not done any customization to the interface
No - we have not done any custom code
We experienced good and fast response from the account manager, and Tableau employees are open and enthusiastic to answer questions on the technical forum.
No
We ran into an issue with the Oracle driver for 64 Bit server when setting up the connection to our Oracle database, and when posted a question to the support they were able to provide the immediate reply with the correct driver to use.
Yes
Its pretty simple to use for users to navigate through the desktop, and Tableau does provide templates for users to start developing their sheets.
We are currently hosting Tableau server ourselves and is easy to maintain. With the ability to connect to many data sources and probably with Tableau adding new ones it would just be as easy as setting the new data source in the future.
  • Salesforce
  • Oracle E-Business Suite
  • Amazon RDS
  • Internal MySQL Engineering databases
Tableau provides native connectors to integrate and are simple to setup but would need some technical help to setup the connections.
  • NetSuite
  • File import/export
  • Single Signon
  • ETL tools
ODBC connector for Oracle
Tableau has native connectors that make the integrations easy.
The salesrep was easy to deal with and was approachable during the purchase process and had provided the necessary information we had requested.
Our salesrep had followed up about the newer release upgrades and was easy to add additional licenses we needed.
Yes
The upgrade was seamless and was able to upgrade with minimal downtime. The only issue is that every user with the Tableau desktop license had to upgrade as well. It would be nice to have an auto upgrade feature for the desktop as well.
  • We were able to use some of the additional functionality that came with the upgraded release that we saw limitations when developing sheets in the previous releases.
  • We would like to see added functions within Tableau that would allow us to display the data without having to create custom objects in source database and pull the data into Tableau.
  • We would like to see some temp table creation in Tableau to have perform calculations against the data and display the data without having to create the calculations in the source database.
Yes
We had used Trial version to evaluate the software and then upgraded to Enterprise when we decided to purchase. The change was seamless and did not impact any downtime nor any functionality changes.
No
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Tableau is a very well rounded tool for creating action based analysis and visualizations of data against multiple datasets / data types. It is a much more user friendly interface for people with varying levels of software and analysis experience. Much more so than many other tools on the market. Tableau is click and drag whereas others require knowledge of SQL, ETL and Database administration. Not to say that you can't take Tableau to the next level by employing SQL scripts and ETL tools but it's not necessary. Tableau can analyze data in Excel or Access as well as be pointed to enterprise database solutions like Oracle or SQL Server. It can even be pointed to the cloud and analyze things like Google Data. It can crunch through giant data sets with no issues whatsoever. The visualization graphics and maps are excellent. We've had "bake off" sessions with other tools like QlikView and you can churn out things in Tableau in a third of the time as someone else using QlikView.
  • Nothing that I have seen. I've used it in many capacities for both reporting internal to an organization as well as publishing interactive reports and analysis out to customers for their own analysis.
  • Much of this is confidential to our business, but there is a definitive savings in man hours in regards to the amount of time it takes to create advanced action based visualizations of logistics, inventory and forecast data. It is easy to use the tool to pick out visual patterns where there may be issues with shipping lanes, carriers, item inventory or sales spikes etc.... Those all have monetary impacts to them.
Bottom line. It's just great software.
2
Logistics, Demand Planning, Inventory Management.
2
  • Analysis in the areas of: Logistics, Forecasting, Demand, Sales. There's no data Tableau can't visualize in a meaningful fashion
Used to use MS Excel for charts and graphs. MS Access for joining datasets and conducting analysis. Had the option of using QlikView but based on my past experience with Tableau and QlikView, Tableau was a more well rounded tool for analysis and visualization against multiple datasets / data types and it is a much more user friendly interface for people with varying levels of software and analysis experience. Tableau is click and drag whereas QlikView requires more knowledge of SQL.
QlikView, Cognos, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE)
  • Implemented in-house
It's a simple download and desktop install. Tableau server requires more work and IT resources to support the product unless you use Tableau's hosted offering.
  • Online training
  • In-person training
  • Self-taught
Instructor was very knowledgeable and did an excellent job.
Both their recorded and live training sessions are great.
It's not difficult to learn if you have some experience with reporting and analysis tools however it helps to sit through a few basic on-line tutorials or go to a live class. The learning curve is not very steep.
Does what you need out of the box.
No
Not needed.
Tableau has been excellent with any questions I've ever had. They have excellent on-line tools, classes and forums to interact with other users.
I could teach a monkey to use Tableau, that's how easy it is to use. Point to your data set. Select the fields you want to analyze or visualize. Pick a visualization or map type that is already automatically refined and suggested to you based on the data you selected. Click Show Me. Done. Didn't like it? Hit undo. Do it again. Want it back? Hit re-do. You can manually build analysis and maps as well.
I've never had an issue with it being down or having a bug.
The only issue I've ever had wasn't related to Tableau. It was our network.
  • Oracle and SQL Server.
  • No.
Very easy and helpful in both respects.
Jon Boeckenstedt | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Tableau allows us to connect to almost any data set we can muster without translating or restructuing
  • It allows end users who are business experts but not technical experts to explore and visualize data in ways that are visually rich, compelling, and highly communicative
  • Can't think of any
  • NA
We are widely implemented and use continues to grow as more people discover it. It has widespread adoption and very high end user satisfaction.
100
All aspects of the university: Admissions, Financial Aid, Academic Affairs, Business Operations, IT, Student Affairs.
1
A server admin who does this as a part of his duty; in FTE the actual number is less than one.
  • Easily publishable and shareable dashboards
  • Critical, time-sensitive ad-hoc reports
  • Engenders a sense of curiosity about data among young staff
Excel
Although I evaluated Omniscope, several versions of Xcelsisus, and have since looked at Qlikview, I find that Tableau offers extraordinary power to the end user; that is, the people who know the business best. This is true and especially important for non-technical business experts.
  • Implemented in-house
Our IT Staff implemented server and does upgrades, and we've had only minor glitches, all of which are quickly resolved.
  • Online training
  • In-person training
  • Self-taught
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.
Videos online are exceptionally thorough.
I would recommend a few videos, then exploration, then videos and then the community.
No
Not available, but not needed.
The email and call support is exceptional; although I have had few problems, they are usually solved within an hour. In addition, Tableau has developed a large and knowledgeable community of users who help each other, and I find them to be among the best spokespeople for the software.
The training videos on the website make the software seem exceptionally easy. In fact, in real life it's even easier.
Other than upgrades, we've never had downtime that I'm aware of.
Recent versions have improved speed dramatically, and the data engine that is built in can sort through millions of rows of data in very short time.
Exceptional. We had the phone numbers of the VP for sales, and found negotiation very easy.
NA
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