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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 …
Continue reading
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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 8.2

Ad-hoc Reporting

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

8.8
Avg 8.1

Report Output and Scheduling

Ability to schedule and manager report output.

8.6
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.

8.8
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

8.7
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

(2261)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(126-150 of 194)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
June 30, 2016

Tableau: If you don't use it... I don't want to work for you ...

David Fickes | TrustRadius Reviewer
David Fickes
Decision Sciences - Modeling, Simulation & Analysis
San Francisco State University (Higher Education, 1001-5000 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
Pros and Cons
  • 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.
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau is a wonderful tool for exploratory data manipulation. It has a learning curve but once you understand its view of the world, many things fall into place. Lot's of flexibility -- you'll never want to go back to Excel alone. The storytelling feature could use a bit more polish in its choice of defaults. You can end up with a great final result but it takes a while to get there.
June 29, 2016

Tableau-University Use

Verified User
Former Employee in Information Technology
Higher Education Company, 1001-5000 employees
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
I am a student. Tableau Desktop is mainly used in class settings as a resource. I personally have used it to transfer Excel data and generate charts, graphs and dashboards. The main concept was learning how to create and use dashboards that can be used for predictive analytics. Tableau was the featured software designed to use dashboard objects to manipulate data immediately and provide different outcomes based on various different scenarios. Although there was no business problem, it did solve the education need for a predictive analytics tool.
Pros and Cons
  • The functionality of dashboard gadgets is very easy and the data relationships are easy to understand.
  • The visualization of dashboards is excellent. Tableau helps produce dashboards that are second-to-none in regards to the visualization and gadget presentation of its dashboards. A new user could understand how an existing dashboard works with very little time of use.
  • The process of designing each dashboard is too complex and is too time consuming. Every little detail has to be added, which is slows the process down and takes away from the objective of the dashboard. There needs to be a faster way to design a dashboard.
  • Tableau is very difficult to understand for first time users. It needs to be more user-friendly in terms of navigating through the software. It is difficult to differentiate exactly what the user is doing or wants to do.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is well suited for predictive analytics or other hypothetical scenarios. It is obviously useful for interactive dashboards. It seems to be for a single point-of-time data and is not useful for live or changing data.
June 27, 2016

The Current Leader in Visualization

Verified User
Professional in Other
Education Management Company, 1001-5000 employees
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
I use Tableau as part of teaching business analytics at a university level.
Pros and Cons
  • Visualization
  • Data Filtration
  • Basic Data Cleansing and Mashup
  • Joining different data sets
  • Publishing to more formats
  • Increased flexibility to annotate visualizations
Likelihood to Recommend
Best suited for visualizing data that has been properly cleansed, integrated, and prepared for analysis.
June 21, 2016

Tableau: Good but not idiot proof

JW
Jason Westenskow
Director Business Intelligence
Allconnect (Consumer Services, 501-1000 employees)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Tableau Desktop within our BI and Analytics Team fairly sparingly and mostly for the geocoding and mapping of our data for presentation. At a smaller level we have used Tableau for quick analysis.
Pros and Cons
  • Great for geocoding/viewing content plotted on a map
  • Analysis features are very powerful
  • Data connectivity options are numerous
  • Overly complex for the lay business user to connect to data
  • Needs to save connections and credentials such that they can be re-used
Likelihood to Recommend
It's good for a start-up analysis but requires some investment to publish visualizations within the organization.
June 09, 2016

Best data visualization and analytics tool out there

Libardo Lambrano | TrustRadius Reviewer
Libardo Lambrano
eCommerce Manager Florida/Latin America & Caribbean
Hilton Worldwide (1001-5000 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pros and Cons
  • It helps me to analyze individual performance, for example of one of our hotels, compared with other Hilton hotels in the region.
  • It helps me to visualize trends and identify outliers very easy. I can take action faster on any issue that I identify.
  • Data visualization is the best thing Tableau does, also the availability to apply filters and date ranges on the flight is fantastic.
Likelihood to Recommend
For data analysis I think is the best tool out there. MicroStrategy has similar features but not the flexibility that tableau offers to create and manipulate dashboards and reports on the flight. Both Tableau and MicroStrategy are very fast, but in terms of flexibility Tableau is king. Plotting geo data in MicroStrategies is a disaster, Tableau does a much better job identifying countries, cities and regions around the world. The connectivity to external files is smoother in Tableau, in MicroStaregy it is not easy to update a data source once is connected with MicroStrategies desktop. Both Tableau and MicroStrategy are good sharing reports, but i like more the interface of Tableau and the capability to save specific views.
June 09, 2016

Increased productivity and client satisfaction

Judith Breisch | TrustRadius Reviewer
Judith Breisch
VP Analytics
Citrix Systems, Inc., SaaS Division (Computer Software, 5001-10,000 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pros and Cons
  • Blending data from a variety of different sources such as SQL Server and CSV and Excel files. Allows you to get up and running quickly, without waiting for data integration, loading, etc.
  • Ability to designate a column of data to be a dimension or a metric. Enables a whole new level of flexibility versus a pivot table!
  • Drag-and-drop detail for pop-up text. Great way to annotate visual without extra work or consuming screen space.
  • Linking filter actions across objects on a dashboard significantly enhances visualization and interaction for the user.
  • Cannot put multiple metrics on the secondary vertical axis. Some workarounds available, but less than ideal.
  • Wonderful feature of floating containers in dashboards, however, "No Fill" for background color is white, not transparent, which limits where you can float the containers.
  • Metric calculations are SQL based, so more complex joins and formulas require custom SQL coding.
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau was (is) a great solution for our situation, but you will want to evaluate your needs and cost trade offs. While a bit dated, the Gartner Group Research Wave Q3 2012 on Advanced Data Visualization Platforms, could be a good starting point in the process. It has many criteria to consider and a summary of major players.
June 08, 2016

Tableau Desktop - Why & Why not?

Abanish Mishra | TrustRadius Reviewer
Abanish Mishra
Business Intelligence Analyst
Match.com (Internet, 201-500 employees)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Tablea Desktop Overview

Tableau Desktop is used to visualize and analyze data, create workbooks, visualizations, dashboards and stories.The way it works is the developer creates a data source, bring in the data inside Tableau from the corresponding data source, create visualization, grid or dashboard and finally publish it to the server. Once it is published to the server the end users will be able to go to Tableau online and view the visualization or dashboard. With correct permission end users will be also be able to slice and dice the data to get more insight. Apart from developers the business users/end users generally don't have permission to change the underlying data.


Use Case 1

Cooking the data is very important & this is one of most general use case

Here are the steps of creating own data model/data warehouse & reporting via Tableau Desktop

i) Create your own bus matrix to make sure the you are clear about the requirement. Bus matrix gives you an overview about how each fact and dimensions is associated with each other

ii) Extract, transform all the data either using the ETL tool or using SQL in the database

iii) Build your facts and dimensions using the best practices (Build a star or snowflake or hybrid schema based on the requirement)

iv) Bring those facts and dimension in a separate tool for creating the relationship and associate them( for example SSAS). Basically create a SSAS cube and deploy it in server and push it to EDW or DataMart

v) So now the data is residing in a organized way in EDW or DataMart. It is cooked and ready for reporting and visualization

vi) Open Tableau Desktop and connect the cube using the Microsoft SSAS connector

vii) Build your own datasets, visualization, workbooks, dashboards

viii) Once done deploy them to Tableau server for online access

Let me give a perfect scenario where Tableau shouldn't be used -

If you are planning to ETL the data, create your fact and dimensions and bring them inside Tableau for creating your relationship and hierarchies then you are wrong. Tableau doesn't support any sort of data modeling options inside it. If you are ETLing the data and creating your relationship and hierarchy in a separate tool and pushing them to EDW and are expecting to report and visualize out of a reporting tool, then Tableau would be a perfect tool to do that.

Pros and Cons
  • Creating visuals are very quick. Doesn't need much training. Anyone who can handle Excel can also handle Tableau visualization. The interface is well organized and everything is possible with less clicks. The default color layout & representation of graph & grid is very attractive. So excellent use experience.
  • Data Source Connectivity- It provides lot of data source connection options. Tableau provides an option to connect to a file (Excel, Text, Access, CSV etc. ), connect to DataBase (Microsoft SQL Server Oracle, Amazon Redshift etc.), ODBC connections, Google Analytics, SAP HANA and many more.
  • Excellent mobile support. Tableau put a lot of effort into developing a robust mobile client. Sensitive Control & Reports are pixel perfect.
  • There is no concept of Change Management or versioning. The way it works is -i) Connect to your source ii) Build the reports in Desktop iii) Publish them online. Now for example if you did some modification & republished it, Tableau Online would always show the latest version. There is no way to retrieve the previous version of report.
  • 3D Charts are not available
  • Connecting live to Hadoop via ODBC driver is still painful because of its performance.
  • Cost is high,this means you need to buy a Desktop license and server separately. The cost is a major factor desktop - $2000 with yearly maintenance paid upfront. This combined with maintenance of - $200, which you need to pay every year. This is per user.
Likelihood to Recommend
It definitely depends on the use case of company. If they have the data cooked and ready for reporting they can always add a layer like Tableau on top of their EDW or Data Marts which would make their reporting goals successful undoubtedly. Gartner's magic quadrant rates Tableau the best visualization layer for last couple of years.

One thing to keep in mind is if the company is very small and has less of a budget to spend on tools for each ETL layer, architect and visualization layer then Tableau won't be a good choice. It might be expensive for them. Also you can't bring in facts and dimension inside Tableau Desktop to create relationships and logical model like MicroStrategy.
May 31, 2016

The joyous ride to developing interactive dashboards with Tableau

Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology
Higher Education Company, 1001-5000 employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We are constantly expanding the tool sets at our office so we can provide our users and stakeholders with richer more visually appealing information in a variety of formats. Tableau desktop helps us develop three such deliverable types in ou portfolio - an online public version of a dashboard, a securely sealed Cloud environment dashboard and an alternative to sending humongous Excel files by sending Tableau workbooks with Tableau reader instructions. All three are unique solutions in terms of data deliverables and though other softwares meet similar criteria, the data compression capability is no where close to Tableau workbooks.
Pros and Cons
  • Data compression capability
  • Snappier GUI interface for happier analyst experiences
  • Leading the industry in visually appealing visuals
  • Loads of customization possible
  • Availability of loads of resources online
  • Lots of users to share their experiences and problems online
  • User service/support from Tableau after product sale needs improvement
  • Many new generation visuals need to be added to defaults and automatic graphs (eg. Sankey, decision trees etc.)
  • Industry specific solutions can help a lot
  • Cost is very high (especially for higher education institutions and non-profits)
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau Desktop is very much in sync to the new world of big data and data visualization for amazing analytics. Its user GUI is so simplistic that we let new employees especially interns, students and temporary workers start development using ready datasets in tableau. They gain useful experience and we get much more ROI on the short working periods of these employees as they are able to learn fast and produce data reports faster. Users too love the interface and our capabilities to make small tweaks for them easily.
May 26, 2016

Tableau - the better BI tool

Paul Morgan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Paul Morgan
Senior Product Manager
Experian (5001-10,000 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pros and Cons
  • Clean 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.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you are looking for a BI Visualization and Analytics tool and have looked at Tibco and MicroStrategy (to name but two), then this is worth putting on the top of your list.

This application is great for displaying BI content on screens but not really best used for the dumb reporting that tools like Crystal do better - however it can do it but it's a hammer to crack a nut.

This application may also redefine how you think of your BI solution. Get the public version and try it out.
May 25, 2016

Tableau Desktop reality revealed

Verified User
Consultant in Information Technology
Information Technology and Services Company, 10,001+ employees
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Tableau Desktop is used as the BI tool for a group of 3000 end users and more than 300 developers in our organization. We moved out of tools like Cognos, BO to Tableau for all our reporting and analytic needs. Tableau is cost effective and useful for quick turn around and is very suitable for self service BI.
Pros and Cons
  • Connectivity to RDBMS, Excel, Files, Big Data. So a wide variety of data can be reported through Tableau.
  • Tableau extracts can get the data out of source system and store it in the Tableau server or desktop user's machine to enhance the response time.
  • Wide variety of analysis tips and pre-defined chart features that guide new users to create intuitive reports.
  • Quick filter, easy to share and number of analytical functions to create custom calculations.
  • Blending of sources can be enhanced to provide option for full outer blending.
  • Join option between tables need to have more variety than equi-joins.
  • Restriction of showing 16 distinct dimensional field in a report needs to be removed.
Likelihood to Recommend
Appropriate: SSBI, Agile projects, Analytical Reporting, Visualizations
Less Appropriate: Operational reporting, spreadsheet like flat reports
May 25, 2016

Tab - Blows away Crystal Reports and Business Objects

Mashhood Syed | TrustRadius Reviewer
Mashhood Syed
BI Analyst
Kaiser Foundation Health Plan (Utilities, 10,001+ employees)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
It was being used by a department. At the time that I left this position, there were other departments that were also interested in licensing it. It helped the Operations center visualize how the efficiency of the network as a whole and identify where problem areas were happening in near real time.
Pros and Cons
  • Drag and drop functionality allows a user that is comfortable with MS Excel pivot tables to shorten the learning curve.
  • Ability to quickly build dashboards and publish them to Tableau server.
  • Connecting to your data sources is simple and intuitive. You can connect to multiple data sources easily.
  • If Tableau can make the desktop application web based that would make installation and upgrades much simpler.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you have large data sets that you need to aggregate or process, where does the computation occur? On the local machine where the installation sits or remotely on a server? What is the maximum sized data set that you can comfortably work with in Tableau Desktop?
May 24, 2016

Tableau Desktop for BI Professionials

Verified User
Consultant in Information Technology
Information Technology and Services Company, 501-1000 employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Tableau as a reporting tool to create dashboard for our board of directors and other business users to use. I am the main developer and BI lead on Tableau for the company and use it everyday. Its a powerful tool for visualizing data and creating reports. The desktop client is simple enough to learn while giving you a lot of powerful resources to do more data intensive tasks. I would highly recommend using it as a platform for BI needs.
Pros and Cons
  • Easy for end users to use
  • Straight forward for developers to set up
  • Expensive
  • The web client is clunky and often requires users to open in Tableau Desktop to use full range of features without bugs.
Likelihood to Recommend
Our primary use is a BI platform to create dashboards. However the application also has many analytical uses. I would recommend it as a base for a BI stack on top of your database. There is not much version control so maintaining changes will be a difficult task if highly regulated. I would recommend a trial to see if it meets your needs first.
May 24, 2016

Tableau Makes Data Sexy!

Majd Izadian (majd.izadian@zendeux.com) | TrustRadius Reviewer
Majd Izadian (majd.izadian@zendeux.com)
Managing Partner & CEO - Big Data, MDM, Data Quality
Zendeux Business Data Solutions (Information Technology and Services, 1-10 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Tableau internally for our our analytics as well as for client projects that we consult on.
Pros and Cons
  • Great user interface and easy to use.
  • Great performance in large data volumes.
  • Great for combining different data sources and consolidating into one for reporting.
  • Fantastic visual data representation.
  • None that I can think of.
Likelihood to Recommend
I think Tableau Desktop is a good product for front room BI as long as the data that is being used is trusted and well governed.
May 24, 2016

Tableau for Analysis- great tool!

Jasmeet S Babra | TrustRadius Reviewer
Jasmeet S Babra
Marketing Data Analyst
Brandify (Information Technology and Services, 11-50 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Currently, we use Tableau Desktop for reporting purposes and dashboard views to give an overall position of the organization as well as current and future goals. It is used in marketing department currently by myself, a data analyst. The story and dashboard aspects of Tableau Desktop are the most used forms of it, along with the reports and charts we can export data for cross department reviews.
Pros and Cons
  • It's effective to create custom dashboards.
  • Syncs with your exicting data in any form, be it from Excel or your database.
  • Report exporting.
  • Sometimes it takes a long time for huge Excel files to import.
  • Changing color or minute details like annotation on a specific aspect of say a bar chart is a problem.
Likelihood to Recommend
I think it's the best tool for data visualization in the market today.
May 24, 2016

Tableau: An enhanced graphical analytical experience!!!

Prafulla Kharwadey | TrustRadius Reviewer
Prafulla Kharwadey
Senior BI Consultant
Vistakon, Johnson and Johnson (Pharmaceuticals, 201-500 employees)
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We built some dashboard to check capabilities of Tableau in compared with other analytical products.
We used it
  • for POC purpose
  • for sales purpose
  • for RnD exploring product
  • for developing extension out of it using Tableau API to create TDE files
Tableau once proves good for certain business needs, will be utilized in project solution.
The various factors that will decide feasibility are:
  • Security
  • User Management and authentication
  • Faster development time
  • Ease of use and maintenance
  • Easier upgrade and scalability
  • Performance
Pros and Cons
  • User Interface is awesome
  • End user can also use it easily as it is intuitive and friendly with drag drop features.
  • Lot variety of graphics and charts
  • Showing simple table data in rows and columns is bit tedious. In other software we have straight table, cross table, graphical table. But tableau haven't given much attention. Many people want this simple things to show in table format (data as is)
  • UI Alignment, layout adjustment in worksheet, dashboard, stories is sometime pretty difficult.
  • User gets confused amongst worksheet, dashboard, stories as one can change individually and hence lost in synchronization of it. I think they can reduce so many various terms and stick to only one or 2 area where user can develop reports/charts/visuals.
  • For each chart I have to create a sheet. So in big dashboard where there are 10s of pages each containing 4-5 charts. Imagine the maintenance load and effort to manage it. One can easily lost in so many Tableau sheets.
Likelihood to Recommend
Most suited:
  • When you need a fantastic user interface, tableau is perfect.
  • When need a better map visuals, tableau is better

Less appropriate
  • When you want to build a solution that is easy to maintain, with lots many charts, and you need lot variety of tables (Cross, straight, graphical, summary)
  • When you want to do a complex programming using R, scripting


May 24, 2016

Dashboard Experts, Scorecard Headaches

Phillip Smith | TrustRadius Reviewer
Phillip Smith
Sr. Financial Analyst (Finance Manager)
Spring Mobile (Wireless, 1001-5000 employees)
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We used Tableau Desktop to write reports that we would later publish to Tableau Server. It was used to create sales dashboards and scorecards for the sales operations and field management teams.
Pros and Cons
  • Tableau Desktop has a great variety of visualizations. Once a dashboard is created refreshing the data is quick and easy.
  • The calculations in Tableau Desktop are easy and logical. It suggests as you type, making it quick and easy.
  • Parameters are very powerful ways to slice and filter the dashboards.
  • It's weak with Tabular reporting. It also won't let you reference a specific cell in the same table, making scorecards difficult.
  • It needs some more options on colors, shading, 3D, etc., to add variety to the visualizations.
  • Dashboard creation isn't as easy as it could be. Lining different elements up, centering, etc., was sometimes difficult.
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau Desktop is great if you have simple and/or stable data sources. It's great for dashboards, but not scorecards. High level reporting with drill-down is great, but it does struggle on the drill down if the data is too granular or immense. Some aggregation is required to get speed. You'll love it as long as you're not trying to make it do more then it was intended for. It's not a one-size fits all reporting tool.
May 24, 2016

Tableau - a fantastic product for delivering modern business intelligence

Ivan Miller | TrustRadius Reviewer
Ivan Miller
Business Intelligence Engineer
Experticity (Marketing and Advertising, 51-200 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We just recently implemented Tableau here at Experticity and we've been having generally good experiences with it thus far. We're currently moving towards making Tableau the primary system for people throughout the company to consume data we provide. Tableau's dashboards make it easy for us to visualize what is going on with our business; the product has been great for speedy dashboard development and interactivity in terms of the capabilities users have in interacting with the dashboards via Tableau server.
Pros and Cons
  • Rapid dashboard development. Tableau makes it extremely easy to visualize data in a multitude of ways and combine related pieces into a visually appealing dashboard for business users.
  • Support for a wide array of data sources, the ability to blend or join data from disparate sources together.
  • A large number of built-in chart and graph types to help users visualize data.
  • global filters to quickly slice and dice data sets by whatever dimensions or metrics you desire.
  • We have issues with Tableau calculating different attributes on date dimensions. Because of this, we've had to manually add additional fields to our date dimensional tables to support year over year reporting.
  • Tableau server doesn't currently have support for business users creating their own calculated measures. This would be an extremely useful feature, especially for the users who we consider "power" users that want to perform further analysis on the reports the BI team provides.
  • The live data streams seem to add a lot of overhead and really hinder the "interactivity" portion of the dashboards. Because of this, we've stuck mainly to using data extracts to ensure the dashboard interactivity is responsive.
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau is extremely well suited for most business intelligence use cases, in my opinion. In situations where users wish to perform deep statistical analysis or predictive modeling, a tool like SSRS would likely be more appropriate. Additionally, for cases where users wish to analyze extremely large volumes of data (think in excess of 100M rows), a big data solution would likely be more fitting. For typical use cases of creating dashboards and providing detail on most pre-aggregated data, Tableau really stands out as one of the top offerings in my experience.
May 24, 2016

Tableau is great for visually sharing lots of data from many sources!

Verified User
Analyst in Marketing
Marketing and Advertising Company, 5001-10,000 employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
It is currently being used by a department. It addressed the need to house, sort, segment, and slice a large amount of data to display very visual representations of trends and performance. Its ability to sort and filter data was great.
Pros and Cons
  • House large quantities of data
  • Import various data sources
  • Visually display and organize data in attractive and easy-to-use ways
  • User access
  • Ability to share
Likelihood to Recommend
It was used by my organization for daily/weekly/monthly dashboards because it was easy to update and pull insights from.
May 24, 2016

Tableau is great at showing your value

James Northway | TrustRadius Reviewer
James Northway
Enterprise Program Analyst
Assurant (Insurance, 10,001+ employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Tableau is currently being used by approximately 20-30 users across the organization in different departments. There are two users in my department (Enterprise Transformation) including me that mainly use it for dashboard building and value tracking. Tableau has been helpful in providing value add to enterprise-wide initiatives where we use KPI's or metrics within specific departments. It saves massive amounts of time and continuous dashboard building that used to take hours if not days to develop. It makes it easier to update financial information from said metrics and provide numbers much, much quicker to senior leadership which in turn helps them make decisions easier and faster.
Pros and Cons
  • Being able to provide key performing metrics much easier and quicker
  • Reduced time building dashboards that would normally take hours or days
  • Answers "what if" questions much easier and faster
  • Although there are helpful links I can find via Google, I wish Tableau would make it easier to write calculated fields. For example, I needed to write a calculated field which included a parameter for percentage change in sales. Instead of using "excel" language in the IF, AND, OR I wish you could click on a button that answers your question and either walks you through on how to do it or basically does it what you ask it to do. I spend more time trying to figure out the field.
Likelihood to Recommend
Some of the audience of the end product have not bought into it yet. They prefer the powerpoint method and it could be mainly because they like to see that type of presentation vs. creating another account on Tableau server and logging in. They'd prefer to get a powerpoint and click through it and have the presenter walk through the slides.
May 24, 2016

Data Analytic Queen

Katarina L. Rawdan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Katarina L. Rawdan
Information Technology and Services Professional
Flagler Hospital (Hospital & Health Care, 1001-5000 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
It is utilized departmentally on certain projects. I use Tableau Desktop both corporately and personally from an geo analytic standpoint.
Pros and Cons
  • Population Health - customizable, UTD data that makes findings visible.
  • Real Time analytics and SQL compatibility.
  • The ability to change variables and not skew the remainder of your variables in an environment.
  • The ability to create custom fields for data
  • Lack of reporting ability
Likelihood to Recommend
I use Tableau Desktop for population health DA for the hospital and ACO... and find it extremely useful.
May 24, 2016

Tableau Reporting

Karen Schmidt | TrustRadius Reviewer
Karen Schmidt
Interactive Reporting Manager
Cramer-Krasselt (501-1000 employees)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pros and Cons
  • Great at storing history of reporting, and pulling various reports by division and time frame.
  • Sometimes hard to format reports to fit on page. Often end up with unnecessary blank pages at the end of some reports. Have tried changing page layout and formatting, but can't seem to get the appropriate fit.
Likelihood to Recommend
No
May 24, 2016

Best report compilation software ever

Marcus Young | TrustRadius Reviewer
Marcus Young
Web Application Developer
Aloompa (Entertainment, 11-50 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
The company I worked for did analytics for music festivals. We deployed Bluetooth beacons and the smartphones would submit data (telemetry, geo lat/long, etc). We used it to generate after-festival reports that included percentages of who saw what artists, and most watched artists. We used it for as many reports as you can think of. Tableau Destktop let us do way more than when we were pre-compiling these and running SQL. We were able to move the databases around and let some of the non-technical business side use it to generate reports instead of going through developers.
Pros and Cons
  • It lets people dive into tables/SQL without needing to know complex queries.
  • It's easy to use and makes generating reports very easy.
  • It was easy to set up and didnt require much maintenance.
  • Getting it to do some things that seem easy end up being quite complex.
  • Expensive.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you have standard data sets it works very well. It seemed to do well when the database was well laid out and easy to navigate. When complex tables were found, it became a mess to get to "behave".
May 24, 2016

The power tool of the digital analyst

Stéphane Hamel | TrustRadius Reviewer
Stéphane Hamel
Renowned digital analytics consultant, innovator, speaker, thought leader
(self employed) (Internet, 1-10 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Tableau has become the Swiss knife of the power analyst. So much that I don't do anything in Excel anymore because I always ended up working in Tableau anyway.

Under the definition of Big Data in the recently published book entitled "The Devil's Data Dictionary" by Jim Sterne I'm quoted for the simplest definition of Big Data ever: "That which does not fit into an Excel spreadsheet" (Twitter, circa 2013)

That's a key aspect - Tableau forces you to think differently, address the problem in a new way, and makes it easy and efficient to slice & dice the data at will.

Pros and Cons
  • Slicing & dicing of data
  • Visualization
  • Ease of connectivity to Google Analytics (but always has a downside, see "Cons")
  • Ease of connectivity to dispersed data sources
  • The Google Analytics connector still needs an "advanced mode" where we would paste our own API request. The dumb-proofed interface turns out to be limiting for advanced users (doesn't allow dynamic segments, sometimes lag behind the official API).
  • Data blending between dispersed data sources is often confusing and limiting.
  • A built-in data-transformation step would be absolutely awesome - I often have to use an ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) tool to prep the data.
Likelihood to Recommend
I see Tableau as answering two very different needs:

  • Day-to-day slicing, dicing, exploration, visualization of data - for me this is by far the most powerful approach.
  • Creating powerful dashboards - from the simplest to the most advanced dashboards, you can use Tableau (with the free reader or through Tableau Server) to empower business users with control over filtering and segmentation of the data.
I would also add the evaluation version, or Tableau Public, are excellent ways to get going and learn about the tool. The community is strong and active with plenty of help and examples.
May 24, 2016

Tableau is the perfect solution for our business needs with it's flexibility, ease-of-implementation, and low cost.

Tom Bertolino | TrustRadius Reviewer
Tom Bertolino
Product Development
Cass Information Systems (Financial Services, 1001-5000 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
As a freight audit and payment company, Cass Information Systems has provided data visibility through our existing CassPort client web portal for several years; however, our data visualization features are limited (especially compared to tools currently available in the marketplace). Tableau Desktop (for use with Tableau Online) was, therefore, selected as the business intelligence tool to be offered to select Cass shipper clients. As chief data visualization content developer, my near-term goal is to pilot our roll-out effort across a few test clients. If pilot is successful, we will likely transition to Tableau Server and integrate Tableau content with CassPort.
Pros and Cons
  • Low cost.
  • Self-service format, very easy to implement with minimal IT resources needed.
  • Flexibility...and data visualization features are much better than expected.
  • If original data sources change (e.g. field name change, field added/removed, file name change), it can be tricky to remap new names to previous ones without disrupting existing sheets, dashboards, and/or storyboards; of course, this issue likely exists with any comparable tool.
  • Large datasets require extraction to minimize latency. Extraction can take several minutes. Again, this may be something most other tools encounter.
  • Although I previously mentioned ease of implementation as a strength, there is a learning curve using Tableau Desktop. BUT, there are useful online instruction videos...and our Tableau account mgr is available for assistance.
Likelihood to Recommend
In my opinion, Tableau may not be as useful for access to detail-level data (e.g. 1M+ records). It's a reporting tool; daily exception handling tasks may be better suited for other systems and processes.
May 24, 2016

Tableau - Great for business needs small to XL

Verified User
Director in Other
5001-10,000 employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pros and Cons
  • Mapping.
  • SQL data extraction.
  • Quick filters.
  • The maps do not work unless your computer is connected to the internet; if the data is showing an extract why do I need to be connected to the internet
  • An easier way to learn the Tableau code to build your own equations. You can google or buy SQL coding, VBA, etc. but you cannot easily find Tableau coding.
  • An easier way to lock down the tabs used to make the dashboard.
Likelihood to Recommend
I would definitely recommend the tool to anyone who needs a way to view extra-large data sets. There are different product versions depending on who, what, and how people are going to use the tool. The key questions to review are: How many users do I have? How many programmers do I have? How are my users going to access the tool? Do I want to allow different permissions to the dashboards? What data sources am I going to link to the tool?
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