Analytics with Tableau
We use Tableau to generate daily and weekly reports for our business module to generate our key performance indicators. These insights we …
Starting at $70 per month
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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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- Report sharing and collaboration (156)9.393%
- Drill-down analysis (158)9.292%
- Customizable dashboards (165)9.090%
- Formatting capabilities (161)9.090%
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Tableau Creator
$70.00
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Per User / Per Month
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- No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttp://www.tableau.com/products/desktop
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- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Starting price (does not include set up fee)
- $70 per month
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Tableau Desktop Tutorial | Tableau Desktop Training | Online Tableau Desktop Training - Youtube
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- Tableau Demo: Quick Tutorial to Getting Started with Tableau Desktop
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Tableau Desktop Naming Conventions Part 1
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Tableau Desktop Introduction Part 1
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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 Types | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Mac |
| Mobile Application | No |
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 and Publish to Web highest, with a score of 9.3.
The most common users of Tableau Desktop are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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(2262)Attribute Ratings
- 8.9Likelihood to Renew
- 8Availability
- 6.1Performance
- 8.6Usability
- 6.9Support Rating
- 8Online Training
- 9.4In-Person Training
- 8Implementation Rating
- 8.1Configurability
- 7Product Scalability
- 10Ease of integration
- 10Vendor pre-sale
- 10Vendor post-sale
- 9.2Data Visualization
- 7.9Data Sources
- 8.4Data Sharing and Collaboration
Reviews
(101-125 of 193)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
We have used tableau desktop to find the key reasons for customer churn in one of the largest telecom companies in the word. We have integrated it with R programming to forecast potential customers that can be churned in next few months. This way the client customer support team can focus more on those customers [in order] to retain them.
- Very easy to come up with the dashboard, you can develop the dashboards in a few minutes.
- Good support to database connections, the best thing is that it supports R.
- It's fast when you use one sheet as a filter for other sheets in the dashboard.
- Median calculation using live data(version 8.0, now it has) - although we found a workaround to get this functionality, it would be good if we had an option to use it directly.
- Editing font and color of text is really complex. The user needs to do it all manually so there should be an option so that you can apply styles in a complete sheet and dashboard at once.
- When you try to work quickly and switch from one sheet to other, it crashes.
Tableau 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.
March 20, 2017
Warming up to Tableau Desktop
We currently use Tableau Desktop to provide dashboards to managing departments in an investment company. We use two main types of data sources: an SSAS cube and views on an SQL Server database. Once dashboards are approved, we publish them on Tableau server for the company's internal clients.
At this time, Tableau is mostly used to automate reports analysts and managers used to fill periodically with Excel.
- Connection to data sources, and variety of connectors available
- Easy-to-use data blending functionality, once you experiment it a few times
- Makes visual analysis accessible to a wide variety of users
- Publication of dashboards on Tableau Server is a breeze
- Tableau is ill-suited to work with SSAS cubes, at least when you are used to analysis within Microsoft tools
- Data preparation is not up-to-par with other leading vendor tools (although can be improved through Alteryx if you have access to it)
- The ease-of-use is true for basic analysis, but rapidly gives way to a steep learning curve with more complex queries or when the business context is more mathematics oriented
I have used Tableau Desktop for various projects related to data visualization and showing data analysis. It is very easy to develop various charts, using colour codes to distinguish various trends and has templates to complete the work.
- Helps spot visual patterns correctly.
- Apart from using an Excel you can also connect to your own data set or database to import large amounts of data and use it to drill down and prepare charts.
- The charts and graphs made with Tableau are very interactive with the right information.
- When data is highly granular Tableau must render and precisely place each element.
- Green data fields are continuous and blue data fields are discrete. It is essential to understand what they do previously or else one can get confused. If you do not take Tableau video lessons or read about how the data fields with green or blue fields are different, it would be confusing. Tableau can improve that.
February 27, 2017
Great product
We use it for complex data interpretation.
- Multiple data sets configuration and interpretation.
- Graphing.
- Ease of use.
- Beginning learning curve for staff.
- Can become too complex.
- None other. It's a good product.
February 21, 2017
Tableau ease
Tableau Desktop is being used by one small department in our organization. We use it to track daily and monthly metrics for the organization and to visualize data coming from multiple different data sources. Our agency has been involved with a major data automation projection and depends on Tableau to test and use that data.
- Easy to learn
- Simple vizualizations
- Interaction with Tableau Server so non-developers can explore with filters
- Easy connections to many different types of data sources
- Automatically updated parameters - when my database encounters a new date field, the parameter should automatically update to include that date
- Easier mapping capabilities so I can more easily connect geo-located items with a polygon
February 20, 2017
Tableau Desktop - The Easy Button Analytics Tool
Tableau was initially purchased with the goals of speeding up the creation process of reports based on a very large data set. Over time we have expanded the usage of tableau from everyday sales by zip reporting to even using tableau to analyze potential locations to open up new stores. It has been useful for practically anyone in the organization, it is also simple to understand and read as well from the visualizations.
- Create visualizations of your data
- Join data sources from various files or servers
- Very easy to use even for beginners and as complex as you want it to be
- Could use more tutorials and advanced tutorials even though they have a great community
- Geocoding maps should and can be a lot easier especially when trying to plot points
Tableau desktop is being used in my entire organization. It is very easy to use with a whole lot of functionalities which are very useful to get business users what they really need.
- I like the way tableau integrates with different other tools like Alteryx. I have been using both in combination which makes it pretty easy to get the extract ready for use.
- The vizAlerts is a very interesting and useful feature which makes the data available to users through a simple alert.
- Tableau mobile is something new and I look forward to implementing it in my organization.
- I think Tableau data source/extract as an input is not possible in Alteryx. I think this needs to be integrated well with Alteryx which will definitely increase its power.
- Sometimes the loading time is way too much in Tableau. Should do something with it to match up with competitors.
February 09, 2017
Wonderful Tableau!
I used Tableau Desktop to visualize the global workforce metrics for the organization. The organization previously used PowerPoint for visualizations. Tableau helped overcome a lot of challenges. It is being used by the workforce planning department now. I am not sure about other departments. It's used to create dashboards and charts to present to business partners.
- Master filter and sub filters.
- Maps and location view.
- Easy to use dashboards.
- Story.
- Drag and drop.
- Using a common filter for multiple dashboards is needed in many cases but when we use sub-filters for a common filter, it doesn't work well.
- When you change the data source, all the customization gets reset which is not good.
Currently Tableau is being used to share dashboard metrics with our Retail Development team. Tableau is currently connected to our database server where it allows me to create real-time visuals for market reports and attendance tracking. Before coming to DMC they did not have a Data Analyst or a person that understood what relevant marketing metrics meant to the business. With Tableau, I was able to give VPs and other Execs a look at the business from a high level view as well as dig into the weeds to come out with data relevant for decision making.
- Aggregation: SQL aggregate functions are come last to the aggregation power of Tableau. There are various formulas for annual growth, retention, and ratios that can break a query or stress at database. Tableau simplifies that through calculated fields and presets.
- Mapping: Normally aggregate maps are created in SAS but, Tableau takes the guess work out of creating maps that display various levels of change using metrics.
- Calculated Fields: If you know SQL or even Excel then calculated fields are the gold nuggets of Tableau. Coding custom formulas that are reusable across workbooks, save so much time.
- Measured Names and Values: I struggle getting that blank area of Measured Names to vanish for cleaner reporting but, if you delete one then it removes the metric as a whole.
December 29, 2016
Worked superbly for analyzing web traffic data.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We 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.
October 18, 2016
Tableau Desktop Review
This software is used by both analysts and stakeholders across the business. It solves the problem of having one platform that users of different skill sets can all use with effective results. In particular, the drag and drop functionality allowing you to create reports from dimensions and measures makes it an extremely accessible solution for nontechnical personnel.
- Ability to overlay data onto geo maps to show customer distribution.
- Ability to forecast trend lines.
- Ability to create dashboards by dragging and dropping individual reports.
- Shared filters are not always made explicitly clear.
- No way to stop the auto sizing in the dashboard view unless you have all reports as floating panes.
- Not possible to print off a full dashboard to a PDF when the embedded report has a scroll bar, simply prints the scroll bar.
October 07, 2016
My Tableau Review
Tableau is being used across the organization by various business units and departments. It helped discover all kinds of business problems using Tableau's intuitive interface as compared to other BI reporting tools.
- TDE - takes a selection of data into the in-memory and helps in quicker processing
- TDE - data can be refreshed and scheduled
- TDE - can work offline with the snapshot of data and later connect
- Smart-Trigger the data extract refresh
- More varied sources of data input
- Thin client, smaller footprint, invoked as an applet in browser
October 07, 2016
Tableau - helping you to tell your story ....
Tableau is currently our standard tool for self-service reporting. We have a predominantly SAP and Microsoft environment, with many different SQL databases all over the place. A few years ago our users expressed the need that they wanted to explore data for themselves, without involving the IT department first, and that they would only come back to us if they needed more help. We evaluated the tools available and chose Tableau for this purpose.
- It guides you through the types of visualisations that are possible given your data sets.
- The interface is simple and uncluttered, it easy to access data, manipulate it and it shows immediately.
- There are many different types of visualisations available, and even the browser version is very good.
- Our users complain that it takes a lot to sometimes get their data ready for Tableau. The process is not too complicated but could be simpler.
- Time series data is difficult to deal with. Might have something to do with using time formats from different geographies.
- The geographic capabilities could be improved. Work with geo-info is still difficult and requires pre-work before it works. The MapBox integration looks promising.
September 16, 2016
Tableau Desktop - Leader of the pack
It is used across many departments across the whole organisation. The business problems addressed include being used as a visual analysis tool in conjunction with other traditional applications such as Excel, where it's geographical capabilities can easily visually aid and identify in any analysis work where locale is a useful metric, as well as creation of dashboards for numerous stakeholders to consume where traditional rigid reports are replaced with interactive and user security enabled dashboards.
- User friendly interface, easy to take up.
- Numerous updates, throughout the years I've used tableau, many new features have been added.
- Looks great out of the box, saves time on formatting.
- Licensing is still difficult to explain to new users/stakeholders - could be simplified.
- Lack of backward compatibility, where version 10 worksheets can't be opened by version 9 applications.
- Can be pricey for smaller organisations.
September 09, 2016
Tableau is a good entry-level visualization tool, not great for multi-user, customizable solutions or big datasets
Tableau is used for a lot of analytics and dashboard by pricing, merchants (buyers), finance and other functions. The mapping capabilities are heavily used.
- Mapping
- Simple dashboards
- Visualizations
- Not in-memory, very slow when published
- Not enough customization available to create dashboards and analytical views; filters types and their positioning are limited
- Not enough formulas
- Lack of filtering schemes where one set of filters or individual's filters can apply to any views across multiple tabs or only to a specific view within a tab; lack of customization with filters
September 07, 2016
Tableau is my favorite data visualization tool
As a small company, we're only currently using Tableau Desktop for ad hoc analyses and occasional charts for projects and proposals.
- Tableau's charting is its best functionality, at least for what we need.
- A second, critically important feature is the ability to pull data from a variety of sources, without requiring ODBCs.
- I'd like Tableau to increase its data analysis functionality. I always start an analytics project with visual analysis, and Tableau does that really well. But when I have to go deeper in the analytics (regression testing, ANOVA, means testing, etc.), I have to switch products.
August 29, 2016
Tableau is great for reports!! Wish it looked better and had better options for visualizing.
Right now we use Tableau to generate cost status reports. It's the hub that all of our accounting systems feed into. It provides a solution to be able to compare data from multiple sources in an easy side by side report.
- It generates great reports that are easy to read.
- It can take data from a variety of accounting systems.
- It can refresh data in real time.
- Visually it's pretty boring. Could have a more modern look.
- It would be nice to be able to easily visualize the data on the fly from the reports it generates. If there is a way, I have not found it!
All business users at the companies that I consulted with use Tableau Desktop as their data visualization tool.
- Data visualizations using array of charts etc.
- Ability to connect to multiple data sources.
- Support of mobile and tablet devices with pinch, zoom and drill down capabilities.
- It is like a UI interface for iPhone.
- Enterprise federated security for deployed scenarios.
- Its primarily self-serve tool works well within a department, but if IT has to roll it out enterprise wide, it lacks some of those capabilities.
August 22, 2016
Tableau Desktop - A Powerful, Insightful, Dynamic Tool
Tableau Desktop is being used throughout my organization. Every department from accounting and purchasing to engineering and sales and marketing has a at least a few people dedicated to using Tableau to enhance reporting. My company captures all sorts of data and Tableau is providing a way to turn that data into something meaningful.
- Tableau can handle huge data sources and crunch through the numbers.
- Tableau can shine the light on trends and issues that are hidden among the rows and rows of data.
- Tableau has great visuals that help users tell insightful stories.
- Tableau has great dashboards that are easy to use and easy to make.
- Tableau has a learning curve that is fairly steep.
- Users that are not familiar with joins will struggle initially.
- Formulas in Tableau can be a challenge.
August 19, 2016
Big Data Made Pretty
Tableau is used across the organization in two formats -- financial metrics for our digital line of business and as client services data for our automotive line of business.
- Graphically, Tableau represents complex data in an easy to view way. We use it to map vehicles purchased by zip code.
- And it makes building a story based on data much easier. We graphically can cross reference our newspaper subscribers to vehicle sales, for example.
- Additionally, we leverage Tableau for presentations -- easy to take maps/charts and build compelling presentation pieces that are client-facing.
- Would like to see easier export functions of the graphical displays.
- Would like more intuitive guides to the use so we don't need training.
- File sizes used sometimes cause the tool to be "slow."
August 10, 2016
Tableau Review
The BI group always got hampered by their turnaround time and when they were streamlining projects. Nowadays corporations are moving towards self-service.
Our Research Institute needed to access data, and their nature of work would not allow them to be specific about their request. So first we launched Tableau for our Research Institute customers which gave them ability for self service and discovery. Project specialists and process improvement were our next customers.- The ability to schedule a refresh or cache is very powerful.
- Measures calculations, graphics and the ease of use (user friendly) is very robust.
- Ability to edit, share and create stories.
- Drop down menu (prompt filter) can only be applied on 1 page of the story. I need to control all pages in stories by 1 change in value.
- More types of charts. They have Pie charts, but what about Donut charts?
We used Tableau Desktop to build out visualizations for data related to public safety. This included data about crimes and code violations, which we received from the police department.
- It is easy to start building visual representations of data sets quickly.
- Tableau makes is very easy to share your data and visualizations with anyone across the web.
- It is easy to change the type of visual representation you use (bar, scatterplot, etc.)
- It has a bit of a learning curve. Make sure you go through at least a few tutorials before jumping in.
- Map based representations are not as straightforward as they seem.
- Kinda pricey!
July 18, 2016
Best tool for visualisation
I was working on it last year and it was the right choice. It is a data visualization software that lets me see and understand data. I used it to show our sales and management team quick dashboards about performance and products. I also used it to analyze data.
- Stunning dashboards.
- Good visualizations.
- It is easy to use.
- Different functions like average, sum, and count.
- Easy to create graphs and dashboards.
- Tableau is great for analyzing data.
- Huge license cost.
- Difficult to create complex charts.
- Limited data.
Tableau is used as a teaching tool for visualization across several departments. It is also used by these departments and others to create visualizations for budgeting and other external communications for the public, government staff and elected officials. Ultimately, these visualizations have a wide circulation and are key to demonstrating our commitment to a wide variety of social initiatives.
- Geographic visualizations with demographic substrates.
- Combining multiple visualizations into a single dashboard presentation.
- Creating exploratory dashboards.
- Storytelling.
- Their ability to send presentations using a snapshot of the data is outstanding.
- Could use a bit more flexibility in their approach to stories.
- Relatively expensive on a per seat basis.
- The viewer requires substantial hardware for good responsiveness.