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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 (157)
    9.3
    93%
  • Drill-down analysis (159)
    9.0
    90%
  • Formatting capabilities (162)
    9.0
    90%
  • Customizable dashboards (166)
    8.8
    88%

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 8.1

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.

8.6
Avg 8.3

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 8.0

Access Control and Security

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

8.8
Avg 8.5

Mobile Capabilities

Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

8.4
Avg 7.9

Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding

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

8.8
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 Competitors

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

(2259)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 99)
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April 24, 2024

Tableau Desktop - All in one business intelligence tool

Verified User
Analyst in Corporate
Computer Software Company, 1001-5000 employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Tableau Desktop is Best visualisation tool for business intelligence.
We can make real time dashboard and reports with eye catching user interface and Charts.
best part is 100+ data connector are available to get data from.
using Tableau Desktop from last 1year and found the best visualisation tool.
you can create calculated field also for making some kpi. This KPI will help your business to grow and decisions making.
overall solving your all business visualisation need. Can create dashboard for any domain. Collaboration of file is very easy.
Pros and Cons
  • Can create best eye catching report with interaction.
  • Easily calculate and visualise business KPI , that will help your business for making good decisions
  • Can easily collaborate report
  • Nit budget friendly
  • Some formatting options and chart options is still missing
Likelihood to Recommend
Best suited for Making detailed report for any domain.

when we make same kind of report it’s repeated options only
February 27, 2024

Analytics with Tableau

Verified User
Consultant in Product Management
Consumer Goods Company, 10,001+ employees
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Tableau to generate daily and weekly reports for our business module to generate our key performance indicators. These insights we use in our business review meetings to understand the business performance with our target baseline. Through this, we can able to identify the areas of improvement and contribute to decision-making.
Pros and Cons
  • Easy to import the data from various external sources and transform them as per the business requirements.
  • Through Quick analysis tool bar option, we could easily calculate certain metrics and boost productivity
  • We use set and parameters in Tableau to generate business insights required for our process.
  • It has poor performance while handling large data sets and takes a longer time to complete certain tasks.
  • Their customer service assistance is not good which should be improve for better experience.
  • They have limited options to export the data from Tableau that should be improved.
Likelihood to Recommend
We have to import multiple data sets from different sources and Tableau has the option to connect with them which saves a lot of time.

It has limited features available via using Tableau on a mobile application which does not allow us to perform certain task and Tableau has performance issues while using it through the mobile.
February 06, 2024

The gold standard in data visualization

Verified User
Analyst in Research & Development
Banking Company, 10,001+ employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
I use Tableau to create interactive dashboards from individual charts and graphs. It helps visualize complex data and share reports cross functionally with the click of a link. The fact that dashboards are connected to live data sources that refresh periodically ensures accurate and efficient reports. Tableau offers limitless features and is highly customizable. It is truly the gold standard in data visualization.
Pros and Cons
  • Data visualization.
  • Data sharing/collaboration.
  • Report building.
  • Analytics.
  • Expensive pricing.
  • Slow performance for large data files.
  • Poor customer support.
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau is valuable in its ability to allow viewers to filter and manipulate data to find answers to their own questions. Having the data connected to live source keeps all stakeholders up to date with the relevant data. However, sometimes large data files can take a considerable amount of time to load. Tableau's lack of an auto-save feature is also inconvenient.
December 02, 2022

Tableau Desktop: Best in business

Verified User
Consultant in Information Technology
Information Technology & Services Company, 10,001+ employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
With the ever-evolving data needs and usage of advanced analytics, it is of prime importance that we use the right tool for the requirements. Tableau Desktop is one such tool at this juncture that is widely used across organizations and widely famous among business leaders and C-suite members. It addresses a diverse range of business use cases, especially to summarize and synthesize the findings.
Pros and Cons
  • Tableau Desktop allows people to make data-driven decisions
  • Uncover new insights more frequently
  • With a couple of clicks, Tableau Desktop connects directly to thousands of data sources, both on-premises or in the cloud, making it easier to start an analysis
  • Pricing should be more user-friendly and usage-driven
  • Making edits to the production reports is fairly tough and has a vast scope of additional capabilities
  • Tableau Desktop should be able to differentiate itself from the Tableau server else there is no major meaning of two different products being offered
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.
April 19, 2022

Visual reporting gone right

NP
Nicoll Pistorius
Sales Development Representative
ServiceTitan (Computer Software, 1001-5000 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
This has got to be one of the coolest ways of displaying and viewing reports! I really love how everything integrates with the systems that we already use and it all seamlessly works together! The real time updates are also huge! I highly recommend Tableau Desktop especially if you haven't tried it yet!
Pros and Cons
  • Real Time Reporting
  • Team Access
  • All in one place
  • filters
  • accessibility
  • customization
Likelihood to Recommend
From data prep to dashboard consumption, Tableau Desktop 2022.1 makes data analysis easier at every stage. It is an excellent data visualization and business intelligence tool used for reporting and analyzing vast volumes of data. It helps users create different charts, graphs, maps, dashboards, and stories for visualizing and analyzing data, to help in making business decisions.
March 28, 2022

A large amount of data analysis can be performed without stress

NS
Nobuyuki Suzuki
CAA (Chief Applications Architect)
F-TECH INC. (Automotive, 5001-10,000 employees)
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We have used Tableau Desktop to analyze development efforts. Until now, the work man-hours of each person in charge were collected in detail, but it took a lot of man-hours to find improvement points. We used Tableau Desktop in the scope of development man-hours management.
Pros and Cons
  • The user interface is easy to understand, so it doesn't take long to learn how to operate it.
  • Even if you handle a huge amount of data, it will not slow down.
  • It is easy to extract data from various points of view.
  • Creating a diagonal reference line requires a lot of steps.
  • In many cases, if you're used to working with Excel, you'll find that simple things can't be done easily with Tableau Desktop.
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau Desktop can handle a large amount of data lightly, but when dealing with a small amount of data, it may be easier to obtain results using Excel. If you experience stress using Excel, I recommend trying Tableau Desktop.
March 06, 2022

Tableau is widely used, but needs more support and functionality

Jeremy Pierce, MBA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Jeremy Pierce, MBA
Data Warehouse Engineer
Vivint (Wholesale, 1001-5000 employees)
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Tableau Desktop to prepare data sources and dashboards in our organization. We are able to solve simple business problems & use cases with Tableau Desktop. We are able to analyze & share our data points both within teams and with external teams. We are able to monitor data as it comes in and analyze trends quickly & easily.
Pros and Cons
  • Nearly pixel perfect graphs
  • Easily switch from visualizing data to presenting just numbers
  • So many data point connectors. If you have data, it'll connect to it.
  • So many moving points to make a detailed graph.
  • The visualizations are very rudimentary which leads to analysts creating multiple visualizations to overlay over each other in 1 dashboard.
  • Data is a full truncate & reload, or you can use an API but it is an append only data flow.
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau Desktop is great if you use "Live Connections". Trying to use data sources is a nightmare. When consuming data for dashboards, it is either a full truncate & reload overnight which can take a long time depending on your data warehouse. Or you can use their Hyper & Rest APIs to automate grabbing new data, but it is append only. This means that if you have data that has changed, if you try to use these APIs you will then get duplicate primary keys in your data. So then you are forced to use the live connection or truncate & reload. So you can't source all of your data in 1 data source as that's too large, so then you are left with several small disparate data sources that you then have to support.
January 14, 2022

Tableau and experience working with it

Verified User
Team Lead in Manufacturing
Chemicals Company, 1001-5000 employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Tableau for analytics and analysis of various manufacturing units data. We build reports to analyze incidents and injuries that happen at the manufacturing plants. Tableau reports help users and managers to monitor the incidents and analyze their causes of them. this reduces the research time for each incident and also gives daily and weekly snapshots.
Pros and Cons
  • Creating various graphs using key data points.
  • Geographical representation of data.
  • Create Key performance indicators based on dates.
  • Trend lines, heatmaps.
  • More chart features/options outside of ShowMe.
  • A better way to represent financial data.
  • Data prep and data cleaning features.
  • Custom formatting options, date functions.
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau is one of the best BI tools to analyze data. Tableau helps to analyze weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly data with comparison to previous years. it also helps to analyze the best selling products or least sold products within a company. If users are still interested in visualizing data in excel format or in tables format Tableau is not the best tool.
November 01, 2021

Tableau Desktop for Data Analysts

Verified User
Analyst in Customer Service
Consumer Goods Company, 1001-5000 employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Tableau Desktop is currently being used in my project. The most common implementation of Tableau is to create complex data visualizations to extract meaningful business insights, and thus it caters to all audiences. This helps us to create interactive dashboards with a sequence of visual graphics called stories. Recently we have also integrated Tableau with R and Python to easily map data insights to dashboards in real-time. Since Tableau can handle large amounts of data, complex statistical computations also help in providing dynamic variations to the dashboard.
Pros and Cons
  • It can handle very large amount of data
  • Drop-down options in dashboards allow users to analyze the impact of clusters within the dataset
  • It integrates well with Python and R
  • It is strictly a visualization tool, hence no data preprocessing is possible
  • Non-coding Tableau users will find it difficult to preprocess data using Python/R and then push the preprocessed data to Tableau
  • The reports generated has to be updated manually since Tableau does not allow automatic refreshes
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau Desktop is well-suited in projects where large datasets are used to gain business insights. A simple use-case for me is creating machine learning models and predicting outcomes and creating interactive dashboards using these predicted values and other accuracy metrics. The only limitation faced is preprocessing the data at an early stage (either in Python or R) and feeding this preprocessed data to Tableau.
October 06, 2021

Tableau for the win!

Aquinov Mathappan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Aquinov Mathappan
Systems Administrator II (Business Intelligence)
Florida International University (Higher Education, 5001-10,000 employees)
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We heavily use Tableau to analyze student performance, student retention, and to identify students at risk.
Pros and Cons
  • Excellent data visualization tool.
  • Easy to learn and great support from the community.
  • Great ecosystem to manage data for organizations of any size.
  • Expensive for small organization
  • Product support from Tableau is limited
  • Need more easy to use templates for users who are just starting out.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you have some SQL knowledge, possibilities are endless for a data analyst.
August 16, 2021

Tableau Desktop - A Powerful BI Tool

Joseph Alleruzzo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Joseph Alleruzzo
Director, Client Lead
Havas Media (Marketing and Advertising, 10,001+ employees)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Tableau Desktop to connect directly to our different data streams within our organization. It is mostly cloud base for easy plug-in. From there we develop dashboards to understand results and develop insights. Since we work with a lot of data, Tableau Desktop helps organize and scale at ease.
Pros and Cons
  • Sorting reports
  • Data visualizations
  • Fast response
  • High cost
  • Poor sales support
  • No real time updates
Likelihood to Recommend
We have created a number of different Workbooks for our digital marketing efforts. We tie in data from all of our advertising sources, website analytics, sales data, and customer management platforms. Our team members get these reports on a weekly basis in order to understand the impact and make quick decisions for optimizations.
August 13, 2021

Tableau Desktop - The most robust analytical tool

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Hospital & Health Care Company, 10,001+ employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Departments that are creating visualizations and sharing them with others within the company are using it. We like to keep things internal and confidential so we use Tableau Desktop. Usually, analytics teams or finance teams would create the visualizations for sales reps to look at. The data sources come from the BI&A admins. It makes it very easy for users to create nice, easy-to-read visuals.
Pros and Cons
  • User friendly
  • Easy to download, access, and use
  • Has a lot of visualization options
  • More customization
Likelihood to Recommend
It can get very pricey for some companies and teams. People always try to figure out ways to get the free trial or create visuals for less. Sometimes users tend to go with PowerBI if it's something quick and doesn't require Tableau licensing. It is always the most powerful of the two and better in the long run.
May 14, 2021

Tableau offers a flexible and powerful tool used by all areas of our organization

Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology
Hospital & Health Care Company, 10,001+ employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Tableau is currently being used in several different departments to display trending data related to patient safety and status, financial and claims highlights, tracking patterns related to inpatient flow through the hospital. The flexibility of data sources and display options had made it a popular tool for analysts in financial and clinical areas.
Pros and Cons
  • Displaying complex trending data in simplified format
  • Creating stories to use as presentation materials with data highlights
  • Customized statistical models with trending predictions
  • 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
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau has been extremely useful at our organization due to the flexibility it allows for data sources and displaying data. We have multiple types of databases, Tableau is compatible with all of them. The advanced functionality such as using scripting languages and the R open source language for statistical analysis allows for a large range of capabilities.
May 13, 2021

Tableau Desktop - A great choice for Data Analysis

RK
Rahul Kapoor
Software Engineer
Fidelity Information Services (Financial Services, 5001-10,000 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
It is widely being used by my organization before making any business decisions. Complete Analysis is done with the banking data provided, as you can import data directly from the database management systems like SQL, do data cleaning and then visualize and extract a lot of insights from the data which is helpful to higher management and client to come to common grounds and make better business decisions. Also the data can be presented using its nice storytelling feature.
Pros and Cons
  • Storytelling.
  • Data visualization.
  • Data analysis.
  • Pricing.
  • Poor support.
  • Lags sometimes.
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau is a highly useful Business Intelligence software where you want to extract insights from a large chunk of data and present data in a storytelling way. It has a very high learning curve as you can do almost anything you can think of with it in terms of visualization and data analysis with a lot less clicks. Also you can do all of this either on your local machine using their Tableau Desktop or even on cloud.
May 10, 2021

Tableau - best tool for starting BI

MB
Martin Baumgartner
Junior Data Scientist
Siemens (Industrial Automation, 5001-10,000 employees)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Tableau is being used by our organization across all levels. From shop floor to the chefs office. We visualize quality data as well as sales figures. It's the most used BI tool in our organization.
Pros and Cons
  • Nice UI for designers and users.
  • Easy to create new dashboards.
  • A wide range of connectivity.
  • Handling large data sets.
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau is good with getting an overview over your data. Load the data and drag'n'drop your data to build nice charts. You see at a glance where you're missing data or [where] the data quality is bad.
April 30, 2021

Quick and easy solution

Verified User
Analyst in Professional Services
Financial Services Company, 10,001+ employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Tableau [Desktop] is used across the entire organization and in my specific case, I am using it for quarterly monitoring. It has been a fairly good tool to use once you have the graphs set up and for monitoring you just need to provide the data in the requested format to update.
Pros and Cons
  • Quick
  • Easy
  • No code
  • Costly
  • Non-transferrable knowledge
  • Have to work locally
Likelihood to Recommend
[Tableau Desktop] is suited like in my situation that the legacy tools have been set and the work will not last for too large so that there is no point for you to reinvest the time and energy to recreate the graphs in other tools and have to validate the result is the same.
April 30, 2021

Highly Flexible Tool with Endless Possibilities

Verified User
Analyst in Other
Retail Company, 1001-5000 employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Tableau Desktop is used across the entire organization and is also used to provide clients with insights. There is one department that creates and manages dashboards/views for the entire company. Tableau is not the only BI tool the company uses but is probably the most widely used.
Pros and Cons
  • Tableau does visualizations very well.
  • It is more intuitive than other BI products.
  • A lot of flexibility on the backend for those with developer skills.
  • Cleaning and organizing data can be cumbersome.
  • Filters and prompts can be tricky.
  • It can take a little longer to learn than other tools.
Likelihood to Recommend
I think Tableau is very useful for teams that are comprised of people that have intermediate developing skills. While it is not always required, having those skills helps unlock all of the capabilities of the tool. Other scenarios that it is less appropriate would be those where the organization is unwilling to adopt an end-user, self-service culture (i.e. the organization wants everything sent to their email in Excel).
April 29, 2021

Good tool with high price

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Computer Software Company, 5001-10,000 employees
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Tableau Desktop is used by multiple departments in my company. Our main use case is to share better data visualized reports to higher management and clients. Also a handy tool for creating sales reports and sales data visualization for better analytics.
Pros and Cons
  • Easy integration with multiple sources like MSExcel,Oracle etc
  • Small learning curve.
  • Many inbuilt chart options available.
  • Executive view option
  • Error messages are not self explanatory .I was doing integration with oracle data but seeing different errors with same query in two systems.
  • Bit expensive .
  • Sometimes is slow and behave weirdly with large datasets.
Likelihood to Recommend
Within our company [Tableau Desktop is the] only available tool and best suit for our needs.
April 27, 2021

Tableau Desktop - intuitive dashboards and ease of use

Verified User
Contributor in Information Technology
Education Management Company, 10,001+ employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Tableau Desktop has been used in the entire organization. It is a very important tool to create concise and clear visualizations. I was able to get started on using it right away with minimal initial training. Tableau Desktop is an intuitive tool, doesn't require coding and the users can become proficient in a short period of time.
Pros and Cons
  • The learning curve is minimal.
  • Easy to use and very intuitive.
  • Tableau provides good quality online help.
  • The dashboards alignment can sometimes become a challenge.
  • It doesn't have the donuts/ the ring as a native visualization format.
  • Sometimes is difficult when dealing with dates calculations.
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau visualizations should be used when an organization at any level tries to get performance metrics regarding a certain business area. Instead of using spreadsheets, Tableau gives the users the an overall and at-a-glance view of the business operations and information regarding different aspects for different areas of interest. Is is also gives the capability to view the data in real time. Tableau maybe less suited for very detailed data analysis.
April 27, 2021

Get your data to talk

Karan Gupta | TrustRadius Reviewer
Karan Gupta
Sr. Associate - Marketing Analytics
Macquarie Group (Financial Services, 10,001+ employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Our [organization] uses [Tableau Desktop] in some of the departments to create dashboards for senior leaders as well as to improve team's overall processes. From understanding the sales across regions and clients to providing a breakup of workfront's tasks and due dates, Tableau [Desktop] is helpful in communicating the vast data into easy to understand and interactive visuals.
Pros and Cons
  • Clear Presentation
  • Easy to use and learn
  • Good repository of learning materials online
  • Connection to Microsoft apps
  • Easier access for users who dont have a license
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau [Desktop] is suited to derive quick insights from large sets of data (organized) to create good visuals to tell a story. It helps in quick communication of complex data and makes it easier to interpret it.
Tableau [Desktop] is not suitable if the data is very unorganized and needs human understanding and manipulation before it can be used. Though Tableau can be used to manipulate data, but if the data needs to be in a certain shape in order to be read by Tableau
April 26, 2021

Tableau - Still Good But No Longer the King

JS
John Stuchly
Data developer
HKS, Inc. (Architecture & Planning, 1001-5000 employees)
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Tableau Desktop is used in conjunction with Tableau Server to provide reporting and analytic content to end users across the company. Desktop is primarily used as a development vehicle by IT to share via on-prem server. However, there is some use of desktop by power users in the business to create ad-hoc analytics.
Pros and Cons
  • Excellent visualizations.
  • Initial entry to the tool is intuitive.
  • Large number of sources supported.
  • Once getting past the basics, creating more complex structures and calculations can be more challenging and less intuitive than other reporting tools.
  • Maintaining version synchronization between server and desktop is annoying. Would be better if the server compatibility could be specified in the desktop.
  • Support for 3rd party olap technologies could be better.
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau is a useful tool for anyone looking to provide analytics with good visualizations. It used to be the best tool on the market, but now other competitors have hit parity, or in some areas have surpassed. Spotfire and Power BI both also provide similar feature functionality. Both should be seriously considered when considering a purchase of Tableau. Power BI is probably the best bang for the buck, particularly if just using the desktop version.

Tableau's relatively recent acquisition by Salesforce does potentially make it a good fit for organizations with an existing Salesforce presence. This may become more relevant as time passes and Salesforce integrates Tableau more with their platform.
December 04, 2020

Tableau Desktop brings data visualizations to you

VT
Vince Tong
Branch Chief
USDA (Government Administration, 1001-5000 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Tableau Desktop is being used by our entire department across multiple agencies. It is our standard enterprise data analytics solution. We have so many silo solutions within our department for data analytics and business intelligence. Based on the department OCIO's evaluation, Tableau Desktop dashboards became the standard for the department and all agencies will migrate their dashboards to Tableau Desktop progressively.
Pros and Cons
  • Ease of use
  • Nice visualizations
  • Strong in geospatial capabilities
  • Flexible to deploy
  • Performance in large datasets
  • Needs more advanced analytics capability
  • Needs adaptors for migration from other BI platforms
Likelihood to Recommend
The Tableau Desktop is very easy to use and build dashboards without any technical background. It is flexible to save in many formats and accessible to other external users. However, the Tableau Creator licenses require keys to operate. This is too troublesome to manage and requires a lot of manpower to maintain and operate.
May 15, 2020

Expensive, but good

Carlos Ochoa | TrustRadius Reviewer
Carlos Ochoa
IT Portfolio Manager
PepsiCo (Consumer Goods, 10,001+ employees)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
The whole organization is using Tableau as a front end. We are trying to have updated insights to accelerate decisions. It is no longer enough nor it is feasible in the long term to have people working constantly on excel graphics and PowerPoint presentations. Tableau is a good way to have reliable insights and set the work efforts where they should be.
Pros and Cons
  • Consolidate data
  • Gives a variety of graphs to choose from
  • Provide executive views
  • Connectivity with SharePoint documents and other enterprise software
  • Increase drag and drop functionality
Likelihood to Recommend
Well suited when you have a report that needs to be updated constantly. It is better to automate the extraction of information and create a Tableau dashboard. It is also well suited when you want to create relevant insights from raw data as it allows you to create your own measures.

Less appropriate when you have a one-time presentation. It is better to use other ways for presenting the info/insights you want.
March 05, 2020

Tableau Desktop Review

Pusshpendar Kumaarr | TrustRadius Reviewer
Pusshpendar Kumaarr
Project Manager Scrum Master
Optum Global Solution (Information Technology & Services, 10,001+ employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Tableau Desktop is being used across the organization for data analytics and visualization. In my area, we use Tableau Desktop to track program and project progress, resource utilization, demand and supply, estimation, and forecasting. I've been using Tableau Desktop for four years, and it helps me a lot in improving the efficiency of the team and productivity and to keep an eye on resource demand. What I like about Tableau Desktop are its frequent updates based on user feedback and great community support for query resolution and learning. You can connect almost every data source with it, be it .csv, flat file, SQL, cloud platform, or another source. Tableau Desktop provides great flexibility of joins and blending of data and easy-to-create visualization.
Pros and Cons
  • Data connection
  • Dataset joining and blending
  • Visualization
  • Storytelling
  • Dashboarding
  • Calculation feature
  • Filters
  • Formating
Likelihood to Recommend
If you have a large audience who just want to see reports, Tableau Desktop is a great tool. But if there are only one or two users, it's better to use alternatives. For example, if a dashboard needs to be published for a larger audience then it is good to use Tableau Desktop and publish it online, but if you are just making a report for your manager, user another tool.
February 11, 2020

Good for a lone wolf

Verified User
Analyst in Quality Assurance
Entertainment Company, 1001-5000 employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We used Tableau to analyze billing and pushed through several million dollars that were stuck because it wasn't visible to management until I created the Viz. We also analyzed quality and security.
Pros and Cons
  • Instantly changes views of data to slice and dice depending on need.
  • Map feature is fantastic.
  • Tableau is very customizable, which means that a lot of simple analytics tools have to be built from scratch.
  • Importing data is not always intuitive to a lay person like me.
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau Desktop can rescue millions of dollars in missing revenue. It can point out trends that nobody knew about. It can give you feedback that allows you to tweak business processes or online learning to better serve the organization. Tableau Desktop doesn't work with databases directly like Tableau Server, so it's not good for real-time applications. Data must be extracted, transformed and loaded.
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