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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

8.7
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

(2259)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(176-194 of 194)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
February 26, 2015

Tableau leads to data analysis capabilities to a new level.

Verified User
Consultant in Information Technology
Retail Company, 51-200 employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
I am starting a proof of concept with Tableau to use as a business intelligence tool in a retail company. I found [it to be a] fantastic and very flexible tool.
Pros and Cons
  • Tableau is very flexible and generates analysis with graphics quite easily.
  • It is very easy to install and use.
  • Its cost is not absurd as others in its segment tools.
  • We are doing a proof of concept for the procurement planning and inventory processes of a medium-sized retail company. In this case, the tool cost and flexibility make a difference.
Likelihood to Recommend
The key points in the evaluation of the tools were flexibility, ease of use and cost.
November 21, 2014

Tableau Desktop Review

Paul Lisborg | TrustRadius Reviewer
Paul Lisborg
Business Analyst
Oldcastle (Building Materials, 10,001+ employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Tableau has been selected as the BI tool for visualizing data across the entire organization. Currently, the tool is assisting us in understanding our sales, procurement, and asset management data. In the future, it will also assist us with marketing and logistics.
Pros and Cons
  • Tableau Desktop is intuitive and requires little training for novice users.
  • At my previous employer, we were able to instantly understand our inbound call center calls with only 15 minutes of dashboard development.
  • The developers at Tableau have successfully produced a product that is fast and easy to use.
  • Sorting and/or Ranking can be a challenge to understand. The ability to easily sort by a field (even if within a hierarchy) would be beneficial.
  • Although not primarily designed to produce printed reports, it would benefit users to have a "Print Preview" button.
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau is perfect for investigating both structured and raw data sets. As with any data visualization tool, you must have a clear understanding of your data and what your stakeholders expect within their visualizations. To effectively maximize rendering times, have data aggregated to the lowest level that users wish to investigate. Tableau’s data blending is a great feature, but it is not intended to replicate SQL joins.
November 11, 2014

Very little not to love

Bethany Klebanov | TrustRadius Reviewer
Bethany Klebanov
Chief Data Scientist
Go2Market Analytics, Inc. (Management Consulting, 1-10 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
I've developed dashboards for sales and marketing using Tableau, as well as supervised others building dashboards. I generally find it very easy to use. The online tutorials are extremely helpful and have gotten me past most issues I've faced. There is functionality that is still lacking that I would like to see. For example, it would be helpful if you could do multi-step aggregation, which isn't available now. This causes the need to do some aggregations outside of Tableau and create another data source.
Pros and Cons
  • Visualizations
  • Multivariable filtering
  • Multi-step aggregations
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau Desktop is appropriate for anyone who understands basic data structures. It would not be appropriate for people who do not understand these structures, as they are likely to create visually appealing, misleading output.
September 26, 2014

Data Visualization Czar -- Tableau!

Verified User
Analyst in Marketing
Marketing and Advertising Company, 11-50 employees
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Tableau Desktop is being used to create a realtime dashboard to understand the marketing ROI and marketing channel effectiveness.
Pros and Cons
  • Marketing Campaign Dashboard to look for patterns over time
  • Overall Marketing ROI -- helps visualize the overall marketing metrics
  • Channel Effectiveness Dashboard -- helps make insightful decisions on marketing budget allocation
  • Ease-of-use, steep learning curve
  • Ability to visualize patterns within a data set
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau Desktop is well suited to visualize a database but requires specific expertise to be able to optimally use the platform.
June 21, 2014

Do you even Tableau?

Joshua Kennedy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Joshua Kennedy
Consultant/Business Analyst
Teknion Data Solutions (Information Technology and Services, 11-50 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
As a Data Management solutions company Teknion is heavily engrossed in all things BI/BD/BA related. This includes doing assessments for enterprises that are considering Tableau as a solution to their business reporting and analytic needs. I am one of many accredited trainers of Tableau Desktop at Teknion Data Solutions and spend much of my time traveling from company to company to deliver onsite hands-on training and mentoring. In addition I also use Tableau for clients who need reports created or assistance fixing a their analytics. I am heavily involved in our sales cycle surrounding all things Tableau as well.
Pros and Cons
  • Tableau is designed around cognition of data and visualizations; this gives it the distinct edge over any other tool in the BI space by allowing the tool to almost disappear, from a technical usage standpoint opening up the door for non-technical users and regular business analysts to do what they do best without limitations of SQL or other DB proficiencies.
  • Due to its very intuitive nature Tableau unlocks the power companies have traditionally been limited in access, their employees. Because Tableau is easy and intuitive any user at every level of the organization can find a reason to use Tableau and make day to day business better thought better understanding of said business. Anyone can be a data explorer in Tableau.
  • The scalability of the software is formidable. Not only are there free options for usage and distribution of reporting and analytics but using all of the Tableau products correctly creates an unlimited scalability for any enterprise to have ON-DEMAND Business Intelligence. That is one of the most powerful elements of the suite.
  • Tableau is a community driven software, and in this regard they do very well; however, more is always better as it will continue to open the tool up to new industries and new ways of doing analytics in those industries. Often there are industry specific features and functions that could be further developed. Things like stats capabilities and regression right in the tool.
  • If I had one feature that could be upgraded it would be parameters. Giving more flexibility around parameter usage in Tableau is really going to open up what users can do with the tool and delivery of their analytics.
  • Tableau desktop is an incredible tool with many robust years of use and development ahead, another area I would love to see improved is formatting. A format painter for example would be great when you are consolidating reports together and need to apply a formatting theme to everything.
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau excels at doing analytics on focused business sectors. Simple, straightforward reporting. One area that might be less appropriate is massive volumes of data being interactively visualized. I find companies attempting this quite often and it is not necessarily the most advantageous way to utilize Tableau. Things like mapping very large quantities of data can be ill performing while ARC GIS and SHP files are still further ahead in this regard, it is possible to utilize elements of said data in Tableau that goes beyond standard features. In these cases I always recommend the community and forums for question and answer. It is a great place to get more info on a feature or assistance on building a report and dashboards.
June 18, 2014

Tableau - Simple Analytics for the Impatient

Anthony Chou | TrustRadius Reviewer
Anthony Chou
Management Analyst
NETE (Information Technology and Services, 51-200 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Tableau Desktop is being used to sort and organize data at the National Institutes of Health. We take metadata and create charts showing trends over time and check whether performance requirements are met through set benchmarks.
Pros and Cons
  • Tableau is a great introduction to SQL since it automatically generates a lot of the code for you. You will probably encounter blending errors sooner or later and fixing that depends on how well you understand your data.
  • Simple and quick to use. Drag and drop interface is fantastic and right clicking solves everything.
  • Lots of support, including forums. Easy to learn, challenging to master.
  • Calculated fields can be tricky, as are window calculations. You really need to understand your own data.
  • I had some issues with scrolling when the view I was making was too large for my laptop resolution.
  • Concatenating rows, combining fields, and other SQL jobs can also require some thought.
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau is good for simple and quick visualizations that don't require heavy calculations. When you want more complex calculations and more technical charts, look elsewhere. Tableau to me, is a visualization tool aimed for quick and simple projects.
April 09, 2014

Tableau Desktop has unlocked the real information behind our data

Paul Elson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Paul Elson
Technology Manager
eModeration Limited (Internet, 501-1000 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Tableau Desktop across our IT and Business Analysis departments. We also use Tableau Server. It has revolutionised how we represent our internal and client facing data and use it to great effect for providing new insights to existing data. Highly recommended.
Pros and Cons
  • Makes it very easy to "blend" data from different places
  • Easy to connect to external data sources
  • Ease of creating visualisations
  • Saving and reusing data sources is not as easy as I would like
Likelihood to Recommend
Nothing springs to mind
March 11, 2014

Easy does it with Tableau Desktop

Colby Bock | TrustRadius Reviewer
Colby Bock
Director of Professional Services
ZOLL Medical Corporation (Medical Devices, 1001-5000 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
My use of Tableau is to report on our customer loyalty program. By building dashboards, Tableau allows me to drill down and make calculated and data driven decisions.
Pros and Cons
  • Interfaces easily with various data sets.
  • Quickly allows me to filter my data
  • Very user friendly setup and charting
  • In the beginning, it can be a bit difficult normalizing the data set, but that's not necessarily a Tableau issue.
Likelihood to Recommend
October 29, 2013

Tableau - Make your analysts feel like rockstars

Peter Rigano | TrustRadius Reviewer
Peter Rigano
Senior Insights Analyst
LinkedIn (1001-5000 employees)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pros and Cons
  • Rapid development of interactive visualizations. Tableau offers an ease-of-use comparable to Excel, but allows for more advanced visualization and is much easier to update if your data set is changing or expanding over time.
  • Database integration. Tableau offers the ability to connect directly to most SQL databases, or to read data directly from a flat text file or spreadsheet. The database connection option can be a huge time saver versus pulling data through a query browser and importing it manually.
  • Graphical user interface. Unlike competing visualization in SAS and R, Tableau lets you create visuals without writing any code. All visualizations can be laid out and edited in Tableau's GUI.
  • Almost completely GUI-based. This makes some types of customization impossible, since there are certain parameters that are completely out of the user's control. By contrast, something like ggplot in R allows for a massive amount of customization, but can be time consuming to learn, code and share.
  • No OS X version available. Tableau claims this is coming in a future update.
  • Limited ability to embed into presentations. If your use case involves creating graphics to embed into presentations, you'll need to export your Tableau workbooks as images, embed those images into your presentation, and repeat whenever your data is updated.
Likelihood to Recommend
Make sure you understand the key differences between Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server and what functionality you are losing with a desktop-only installation. Also ensure that Tableau will easily integrate with all of the data sources you use. It has drivers for many databases including some Hadoop products, and includes ODBC functionaliy, but it's important to confirm that your particular data source is compatible if you want the advantages of real-time connectivity.
October 28, 2013

An Incredible Tool: Cohesive, Powerful, Easy, Fun, Rewarding. A++

Justin R. Romo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Justin R. Romo
President, Product Development
Romo Enterprises LLC (Design, 1-10 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pros and Cons
  • Tableau is an extremely powerful data visualization tool that makes generating insights from large sets of data easy and fun.
  • Creating dashboards, reports, and interactive exploration tools is very fast with Tableau. Sheets can be duplicated and altered to create vast perspectives of data.
  • To be completely honest, Tableau is very proactive regarding product developments. I have never used a software that makes such frequent and leap-frog style updates to their platform. Every year they release ground breaking advancements that make you say "Thank you!".
Likelihood to Recommend
Try it!
October 22, 2013

A great tool in my analytics tools box

Victor (Mingde) Hong | TrustRadius Reviewer
Victor (Mingde) Hong
Principal Software Engineer, Analytics Group
Nokia (Consumer Electronics, 10,001+ employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pros and Cons
  • The product enables users to visualize and analyze data interactively. We use the product primarily to analyze mobile logs so that we can visualize the data across different dimensions like device, geography, date, etc.
  • I am able to visualize 50 million rows of data in the Amazon Redshift data warehouse with no pre-aggregation - in about an hour. The time-savings are really staggering.
  • I can run very complex data queries quite easily.
  • No Mac version.
Likelihood to Recommend
October 01, 2013

Flexible, Powerful, and Easy on the Eyes

Jake Penner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Jake Penner
Systems Engineer
Nokia (Information Technology and Services, 1001-5000 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pros and Cons
  • Tableau is an extremely powerful tool. It provides the flexibility of connecting to multiple variations of data types (Excel document, text, HIVE, Oracle, Postgres, etc) and moving between each with relative ease. It also allows the user to ‘blend’ data between two independent data sources, given a common key exists between them.
  • The visualization aspect is where Tableau really shines. It allows the user to not only create visually appealing representations of your data, but does so with an impressive amount of speed. Tableau supports extremely large datasets (millions of records), and allows the user the options of generating static extracts to take offline, or connecting live to a data source for real-time updates of data.
  • Additionally, the amount of formatting options available to the user at first is overwhelming. However, once comfortable with the tool (which took me about 1 month to get down the basics) having all of these options at your finger-tips is very much welcome, as it allows you to capture the exact ‘look and feel’ you are aiming to obtain.
  • We did have some challenges setting up an instance of each workbook to sit upon different environments. We were running 2 instances of Tableau sever; 1 for QA 1 for PROD. We needed an automated deployment process that modified the table connections to point to 1 of 4 different QA environments. We eventually found a custom solution with individual projects for each environment on a single server that met our needs – but the code behind it was very custom.
  • I also noticed that generating an extract, to which you can then place upon the server and set on a schedule to refresh, forces the user to generate the full extract local on their machine prior to publication. These extracts, depending on the size of the dataset and origin of the data, can take hours upon hours to finish, when simply setting up the extract on the server and letting the more powerful machine shoulder the processing load is unfortunately not an option during setup.
Likelihood to Recommend
Overall this tool is great and I highly recommend at a minimum, downloading the 30 day trial and giving it a chance to meet, and exceed, your BI needs


September 26, 2013

100 Reasons why Tableau can help you!

Brad Llewellyn | TrustRadius Reviewer
Brad Llewellyn
Associate Data Analytics Consultant
Mariner (Information Technology and Services, 11-50 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pros and Cons
  • Tableau is extremely good at turning large amounts of data into useful analyses. Once you are comfortable with the tool, you are rarely more than a few clicks away from a useful visualization/analysis.
  • Tableau's simple, clean, drag-and-drop interface allows for a business to go from 0-60 in record time. There are many types of useful analyses that can be done with no IT knowledge at all. For example, a business analysis can slice his/her Sales or Profits in almost any fashion simply with a few clicks.
  • Tableau is exceptional at answering the five basic questions "Who?", "What?", "When?", "Where?", and "How?". If you can phrase your problem as one of these five questions, then Tableau will likely be of great value to you.
  • Tableau is somewhat restrictive in the type of data it will work with. It likes relatively clean data in a tabular format. This means records on the Rows and values on the Columns. If your data is very messy/inaccurate, then Tableau has limited ability to deal with this easily. There are other tools on the market that are designed to help you clean/reformat your data. Tableau is a visualization/analytics tool, and a great one at that! Use it for its strengths.
Likelihood to Recommend
September 15, 2013

Powerful and easy to use

Manav Bhatia | TrustRadius Reviewer
Manav Bhatia
Consultant
Mu Sigma (Higher Education, 10,001+ employees)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pros and Cons
  • Good for statistical analysis of business data
  • Extremely powerful geographical analysis tools
  • Fairly intuitive
  • Ease of training
  • Recognition of complex data forms
  • Modification of data from source
Likelihood to Recommend
The company offers a paid and a scaled down public version of the product.
August 27, 2013

Tableau 8.0 Review - Be a Data Rockstar

Verified User
Manager in Corporate
51-200 employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pros and Cons
  • Tableau is a very well rounded tool for creating action based analysis and visualizations of data against multiple datasets / data types. It is a much more user friendly interface for people with varying levels of software and analysis experience. Much more so than many other tools on the market. Tableau is click and drag whereas others require knowledge of SQL, ETL and Database administration. Not to say that you can't take Tableau to the next level by employing SQL scripts and ETL tools but it's not necessary. Tableau can analyze data in Excel or Access as well as be pointed to enterprise database solutions like Oracle or SQL Server. It can even be pointed to the cloud and analyze things like Google Data. It can crunch through giant data sets with no issues whatsoever. The visualization graphics and maps are excellent. We've had "bake off" sessions with other tools like QlikView and you can churn out things in Tableau in a third of the time as someone else using QlikView.
  • Nothing that I have seen. I've used it in many capacities for both reporting internal to an organization as well as publishing interactive reports and analysis out to customers for their own analysis.
Likelihood to Recommend
July 18, 2013

Tableau System Review

Jerry Pritchard | TrustRadius Reviewer
Jerry Pritchard
Manager, Sales Compensation
Western Union (Financial Services, 5001-10,000 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pros and Cons
  • Connects to any data source.
  • Simplifies trending for the non-data analyst.
  • Cost effective.
  • Very easy to implement and start using.
  • Does not integrate back to other systems - less of a concern since this system is downstream for analysis.
  • Report archiving can be confusing for the less experienced users.
  • Utilizing images for charting can be confusing as well.
Likelihood to Recommend
I would recommend 'practicing' with your data while utilizing Tableau tips. This software will far exceed your initial expectations. I continue to learn and utilize a personal version.
June 21, 2013

Powerful but Easy Insight for All Skill Levels

Jon Boeckenstedt | TrustRadius Reviewer
Jon Boeckenstedt
Associate Vice President
DePaul University, Division of Enrollment Management and Marketing (Higher Education, 1001-5000 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pros and Cons
  • Tableau allows us to connect to almost any data set we can muster without translating or restructuing
  • It allows end users who are business experts but not technical experts to explore and visualize data in ways that are visually rich, compelling, and highly communicative
  • Can't think of any
Likelihood to Recommend
June 17, 2013

An easy to learn, powerful tool which empowers business users and adds value to the company

Giedre Aleknonyte | TrustRadius Reviewer
Giedre Aleknonyte
Business Analyst
Quickcomm (Telecommunications, 201-500 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pros and Cons
  • It is easy to blend data from different data sources, so one can analyze data sets which would otherwise be difficult to handle in other tools.
  • It has an intuitive user interface and a easy learning curve, making it easy to train users.
  • Can implement Tableau with minimal IT involvement.
  • Interactive dashboards can be used even by people with few technical skills to explore data and get insight.
  • No advanced statistical / forecasting functionality. However, Tableau is improving in this area and future versions of the product should have more capabilities.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is a great BI tool, and also has a very enthusiastic and active user community. A lot of the time the user forums on Tableau's website provide faster help than product manuals or tech support.
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