February 25, 2018
Tableau Desktop Review: "Tableau- The Data Visualizer"
Performance
6
TrustRadius
Tableau Desktop is the rapid-fire authoring environment used to create and publish complex visualizations, reports and dashboards in multiple output formats. Using Tableau Desktop, a report author can connect to multiple data sources, explore relationships, create dashboards, modify metadata, and finally publish a completed workbook to Tableau Server if desired.
The Desktop product comprises two editions:
- Personal Edition: This edition allows work to be saved locally and supports connections to the following databases: CSV/flat files, Excel, and Access.
- Professional Edition: This edition supports a wider range of databases including most traditional relational databases, OLAP databases, Hadoop, and also Salesforce and Google Analytics.https://dudodiprj2sv7.cloudfront.net/product-logos/sv/Ao/PCZWTEQ42WEW.PNGTableauTableau- The Data Visualizer2018-01-23T16:11:20.088ZWe 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.,9,QlikView and SAP Business Objects,9,9,QlikView, SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform,100,3,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,Price
Product Features
Product Usability
Product Reputation
Analyst Reports
Third-party Reviews,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,Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled,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.,8,Online training
Self-taught,8,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,9,Yes,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,9,7,8,6Chandra Bhanu Pratap SinghTableau Desktop: Making an Impact in the World of Drug Safety2014-07-01T14:08:32.006ZTableau is being used within the Commercial side of business and within the R&D side within the Drug Safety department of which I am a part of and which will be the focus of my review. It is being used primarily in support of operational analytics and workflow management within the Drug Safety organization, as well as for risk management within the Pharmacovigilance and Risk Management organization. Many if not all drug safety databases capture data well, and output data decently...but only for pre-defined outputs (native to the drug safety database out-of-the-box functionality), however getting data out of the database in flexible, easy to understand graphs and tabulations is much more difficult. That is where Tableau shines...first of all it allows the user to easily access data stored in an Oracle-based database and many other data formats, and it makes this easy connection without needing any interim transformation, catalog or universe to be created. This is a huge time savings, allowing the user to focus on getting information out of the data instead of just getting to the data. So the big business problem it solves is that it allows easy access to data...and allows the user to quickly turn the data into actionable information. To give our users easy access we create dashboards with visualization and filtering capabilities, and manage the users in Tableau Server in user groups with pre-defined access rights, so it is very easy to add new users and enable them to derive information from data.,Allows the user to easily access data stored in an Oracle-based database and many other data formats, and it makes this easy connection without needing any interim transformation, catalog or universe to be created. This is a definite strength as other analytical applications require data to be stored in or accessed via an interim format.
The drag and drop nature of the user interface and the fact that it begins to understand your data is a great feature allowing very rapid creation of analytical visualizations and tabulations.
The ability to allow the desktop user to quickly and easily push out a series of visualization dashboards to Tableau Server is a great part of its functionality, and allows the visualizations to be more readily used across and organization.,The biggest area needing improvement is in the area of placement of objects in a dashboard during its design. The placement is sometimes quirky and does not necessarily translate to an optimal placement on the dashboard which has been pushed to Tableau server.
It would be nice to have the capability to point at a pre-defined style template which would help in creating consistency in terms of default placement of objects and overall look & feel.
Within the pharmaceutical industry, the ability to seamlessly read in a SAS dataset would be very useful, as currently this involves at least one interim step.,9,,10,9,Connecting to a data source
Using filters
Creating parameters
Easily able to create new visualizations using the "Show Me" tab,Placement of items in a dashboard, particularly when exact coordinates are needed or attempting to duplicate a look and feel,Yes, but I don't use it,9,8Verified UserTableau - the better BI tool2013-10-15T20:02:18.582ZClean visualizations that are not cumbersome or dated.
Exceptional presence on (windows) desktop, web and mobile (capability).
Connects to a variety of disparate data sources.
Faster enablement of reporting and analytics than other BI contenders.,No OSX support (due 2014).
Browser Authoring needs more maturity.
Missing some visualizations (coming in 2014).
Some of the sorting capabilities on calculated fields are limited.
Not great if you're looking for Crystal Reports style static reporting production.
Integration with portal systems.,9,10,Rapid Prototyping.
Great story-telling tool.
Industry Leading visualizations > Customer satisfaction.,30,4,Visualizing data from a variety of sources.
Creating Reporting.
Analyzing and Auditing.,,Implemented in-house,9,In-person training
Self-taught,9,Very easy to just paste or insert data and go - intuitive way of creating analytics.,Yes,9,8,9,8,Google products.
Updated Census data.,Not disclosed.Paul MorganWorked superbly for analyzing web traffic data.2012-11-26T17:20:31.912ZWe use Tableau Desktop mainly to analyze operational data for our consumer-facing website. This involves data from our own web application (sometimes via database connection, sometimes via flat file exports) as well as Google Analytics data (both traffic and events data). We have one user (me) who runs weekly reports that mash up the data from the operational systems and Google Analytics, and then syndicate the output via emailing PDFs of the standard reports around. I also do ad hoc analyses from time to time to try and spot patterns, trends, answer specific questions etc. and sometimes those make their way into the standard weekly visualizations shared with the team.,Tableau is an excellent tool for quickly making sense of millions of rows of data. It does an excellent job of recognizing facts and dimensions in denormalized data files (say CSV or Excel) as well as connecting to larger databases. The learning curve is slight but not too steep if you are comfortable with Excel Pivot Tables or similar.
The visualizations are particularly good as well, as there is a good library of them as well as an auto-suggest feature that for a given series of dimensions and metrics will recommend what chart types might apply. If you have data it recognizes (or is typed) as zip codes for instance it will recommend a geospatial / map visualization.,If you have broader enterprise needs for data security and segmentation, heavy duty report customization, or data transformation, this is less comprehensive a tool than other enterprise BI packages (e.g. Business Objects, MicroStrategy, or similar). That said, what it does, it does amazingly well and at a tremendous value.
One minor annoyance is that formatting applied to a workbook doesn't carry throughout or get remembered as a template. The default choices for font sizes tend not to export well to presentations or printed text, and having to hand-enlarge every axis label every time gets obnoxious. I've seen third-party tools developed specifically for re-using formatting selections across one or multiple workbooks.,10,,10,We just have a single user and syndicate reports by emailing PDFs around. This is a cost-effective answer but clearly not scalable for larger organizations who have other options (Tableau Online, Tableau Server, etc),9,6,10,4,2,As we moved into CPC ads, we might have used Tableau as a quick and dirty ad spend optimization tool by driving into traffic and conversion metrics tied to actual conversion values (the high-level flat dollar amounts you can specify in Google Analytics wouldn't work for our real-time bidding platform we would need to mash up data from Google AdWords and our operational systems and Tableau is excellent at that),We used Tableau to analyze web traffic data, including traffic channels and sources, the conversion funnel, inventory mix and categorization, geographic distribution of inventory and inbound traffic and leads, on a dataset of millions to tens of millions of rows.
We also used Tableau to report on operating metric performance to plan though it provided less unique value in that situation,We were able to very quickly generate geographic heatmaps showing automobile inventories across the US, including the ability to filter/drill on various makes/models
Similarly we could generate heatmaps across the US to indicate where web traffic was originating
Finally, using calculated fields to mash those two up we could quickly and visually pinpoint where supply/demand imbalances existed to direct our business development efforts (e.g. we need more Toyota dealers providing inventory in Atlanta, and we need to target driving more traffic on BMW related search terms in Chicago, etc.),Yes,Price
Product Features
Product Usability
Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor,Implemented in-house,7,Self-taught,I would watch and learn from the online tutorials which were probably 75% comprehensive. There were still things we had to figure out around the edges, but just using online documentation and videos and following the examples was adequate. Any time the documentation is lacking, there's a vibrant online community at the ready, and some members even jump in to provide example solutions to problems!,Yes,9,Drag and drop of dimensions and measures
Styling of visualizations of all different types is easy
Assembling charts and graphs into composite dashboards,There are a few things that should be simple that are cumbersome like data blending can be painful to get right and details like totals on top of stacked bars
Formatting does not carry over from sheet to sheet and styles cannot be universally applied to a single visualization much less a dashboard -- lots of repetitive manual work to style things visually,Yes, but I don't use it,8,10,10,10,MySQL Database,YesVerified User100 Reasons why Tableau can help you!2013-09-26T16:03:47.429ZTableau is extremely good at turning large amounts of data into useful analyses. Once you are comfortable with the tool, you are rarely more than a few clicks away from a useful visualization/analysis.
Tableau's simple, clean, drag-and-drop interface allows for a business to go from 0-60 in record time. There are many types of useful analyses that can be done with no IT knowledge at all. For example, a business analysis can slice his/her Sales or Profits in almost any fashion simply with a few clicks.
Tableau is exceptional at answering the five basic questions "Who?", "What?", "When?", "Where?", and "How?". If you can phrase your problem as one of these five questions, then Tableau will likely be of great value to you.,Tableau is somewhat restrictive in the type of data it will work with. It likes relatively clean data in a tabular format. This means records on the Rows and values on the Columns. If your data is very messy/inaccurate, then Tableau has limited ability to deal with this easily. There are other tools on the market that are designed to help you clean/reformat your data. Tableau is a visualization/analytics tool, and a great one at that! Use it for its strengths.,10,,10,It is very difficult to quantify the effect that using Tableau has had on our clients. The one major benefit I can think of is the reduction of operational expenses. Tableau allows them to keep one person who maintains ten dashboards instead of the twenty people it took when they were using Excel.
Having a series of relevant, automatically refreshing dashboards allows for "quick response" to business problems, which could save tremendous amounts of money. If a problem is occurring, you would see it on your dashboard the next day, instead of an analyst finding it a month later.,5,1,We use this product to help a Shipping client examine an automatically refreshing set of about 60 KPI's. This client has users all way from Business Analysts to Senior Executives.
We use this product to help multiple Retail clients slice-and-dice their sales data. They can now answer questions such as "What are people buying?", "Who are we selling to?", and "How much are they buying?"
We use this product to help an Equipment Repair client track how all of their equipment nationwide is operating from one central, automatically refreshing, location. They also use this product to handle most of their ad-hoc reporting needs.,,Implemented in-house,10,Self-taught,It was my job to learn this product on my own, with only a little help from the others who knew the tool. I found this task quite easy due to Tableau's simple interface. I also appreciate that Tableau is complex enough to keep my interest after having mastered the basics. I truly believe that anybody can learn the basics without training. However, if you want to master the tool, there is no substitute for learning from an expert.,No,8,10,10,8,We have integrated Tableau with virtually every tool in the Microsoft Eco-system. This includes SQL Server, SQL Server Analysis Services, Power Pivot and Excel.
Tableau offers this same connectivity to many other data sources. Odds are very good it can connect to your data as well.,I can't think of a single system that Tableau cannot already connect to.,Unfortunately, I am not aware of this type of information. Tableau was already implemented here before I began employment.Brad Llewellyn
Windows, Mac
Tableau Desktop
1270 Ratings
<a href='https://www.trustradius.com/static/about-trustradius-scoring' target='_blank' rel='nofollow'>trScore algorithm: Learn more.</a>
