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…
The gold standard in data visualization
A versatile platform that can make your daily work life easier!
Excellent tool for data visualization with simplicity
Tableau is a life saver for data analysis and visualization professionals,
Tableau Desktop: Best in business
Awesome BI/Reporting Tool
"Tableau Desktop is a powerful visual analytics tool that helps us understand our business."
Give your data a different form
Visual reporting gone right
"Efficient, Aesthetic And AWESOME Visualization Tool."
A powerful Business Intelligence tool for enterprises
A large amount of data analysis can be performed without stress
Tableau is widely used, but needs more support and functionality
Tableau Desktop is an excellent tool for visualizations
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
- Report sharing and collaboration (156)9.393%
- Drill-down analysis (158)9.292%
- Customizable dashboards (165)9.090%
- Formatting capabilities (161)9.090%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
Tableau Creator
$70.00
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Starting price (does not include set up fee)
- $70 per month
Product Demos
Tableau Desktop Tutorial | Tableau Desktop Training | Online Tableau Desktop Training - Youtube
- Tableau Demo: Quick Tutorial to Getting Started with Tableau Desktop
Tableau Desktop Naming Conventions Part 1
Tableau Desktop Introduction Part 1
Features
BI Standard Reporting
Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.
- 8.3Pixel Perfect reports(138) Ratings
Pixel Perfect reports are highly-formatted reports with graphics and ability to preview the report before printing.
- 9Customizable dashboards(165) Ratings
Customizable dashboards are dashboards providing the builder some degree of control over the look and feel and display options.
- 8.3Report Formatting Templates(144) Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.
- 9.2Drill-down analysis(158) Ratings
Drill down analysis is the ability to get to a further level of detail by going deeper into the hierarchy.
- 9Formatting capabilities(161) Ratings
Ability to format output e.g. conditional formatting, lines, headers, footers.
- 8.4Integration with R or other statistical packages(121) Ratings
Integration with the open-source R predictive modeling environment.
- 9.3Report sharing and collaboration(156) Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration is the ability to easily share reports with others.
Report Output and Scheduling
Ability to schedule and manager report output.
- 9.3Publish to Web(148) Ratings
- 8.4Publish to PDF(148) Ratings
- 8.7Report Versioning(115) Ratings
Report versioning is the assignment of version numbers to each version of a report to help in tracking.
- 9.2Report Delivery Scheduling(122) Ratings
Report Delivery Schedule is the ability to have reports delivered to a destination at a specific data and time.
- 8.5Delivery to Remote Servers(72) Ratings
Ability to deliver reports to remote servers
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.
- 8.9Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)(153) Ratings
Pre-built visualization formats are canned visualization types that can be selected to visualize different kinds of data.
- 8.8Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization(148) Ratings
Location analytics is the visualization of geographical or spatial data.
- 8.7Predictive Analytics(125) Ratings
Predictive Analytics is the ability to build forecasting models based on existing data sets.
- 8Pattern Recognition and Data Mining(2) Ratings
Pattern recognition and data mining mean the ability to recognize hidden patterns in large quantities of data.
Access Control and Security
Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.
- 8.8Multi-User Support (named login)(138) Ratings
Named model access means that users have access based on name and password.
- 8.4Role-Based Security Model(118) Ratings
Role-based access means that access to data is determined by job or position in the corporation.
- 8.7Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)(128) Ratings
Multiple access permission levels means that different levels of users have different rights.
- 9Report-Level Access Control(2) Ratings
Report-level access control means that the type of report determines who has access to it.
- 8.9Single Sign-On (SSO)(76) Ratings
Allows users to use one set of login credentials to access multiple applications
Mobile Capabilities
Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
- 8.6Responsive Design for Web Access(123) Ratings
Web design aimed at producing easy-to-read sites across a range of different devices.
- 8.3Mobile Application(96) Ratings
A dedicated app for iOS and/or Android.
- 8.7Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile(116) Ratings
In-app dashboard reports and data visualization.
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
APIs are a set of routines, protocols, and tools for used for embedding one application in another
- 8.6REST API(55) Ratings
REST is an architecture style for designing networked applications
- 8.3Javascript API(50) Ratings
A Javascript API is a type of API
- 8.9iFrames(48) Ratings
An iFrame is an HTML document embedded inside another HTML document on a website
- 8.8Java API(45) Ratings
A Java application programming interface (API) is a list of all classes that are part of the Java development kit (JDK)
- 8.5Themeable User Interface (UI)(52) Ratings
A themeable user interface means that a specific visual them can be applied to it
- 8.8Customizable Platform (Open Source)(45) Ratings
A customizable, open source API Gateway is a fast and scalable type of API
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
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
Tableau Desktop Competitors
Tableau Desktop Technical Details
Deployment Types | On-premise |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Windows, Mac |
Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(2262)Attribute Ratings
- 8.9Likelihood to Renew39 ratings
- 8Availability10 ratings
- 6.1Performance9 ratings
- 8.6Usability63 ratings
- 6.9Support Rating56 ratings
- 8Online Training4 ratings
- 9.4In-Person Training4 ratings
- 8Implementation Rating34 ratings
- 8.1Configurability2 ratings
- 7Product Scalability3 ratings
- 10Ease of integration1 rating
- 10Vendor pre-sale1 rating
- 10Vendor post-sale1 rating
- 9.2Data Visualization10 ratings
- 7.9Data Sources115 ratings
- 8.4Data Sharing and Collaboration115 ratings
Reviews
(1-5 of 5)Tableau- The Data Visualizer
- Graphs and charts are built very easily.
- Tableau is very good at showing data visually
- Easily help make a decision by looking at the pattern
- The ETL part is missing in Tableau.
- For huge and ambiguous data-sets, Tableau Desktop is not good.
- Before analysis data preparation is mandatory.
- QlikView and SAP Business Objects
2. When comparing QlikView with Tableau both are kind of similar tools, because the purpose of both tools are visual representation of data using dashboards. Although both tools are different at several points like QlikView has very good ETL and features compared to Tableau, while Tableau is very user-friendly and offers drag and drop features which makes it very easy for business users as well.
- Pixel Perfect reports
- 80%8.0
- Customizable dashboards
- 90%9.0
- Report Formatting Templates
- 90%9.0
- Drill-down analysis
- 90%9.0
- Formatting capabilities
- 100%10.0
- Integration with R or other statistical packages
- 90%9.0
- Report sharing and collaboration
- 100%10.0
- Publish to Web
- 100%10.0
- Publish to PDF
- 100%10.0
- Report Versioning
- 100%10.0
- Report Delivery Scheduling
- 80%8.0
- Delivery to Remote Servers
- 80%8.0
- Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
- 100%10.0
- Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
- 90%9.0
- Predictive Analytics
- 90%9.0
- Multi-User Support (named login)
- 90%9.0
- Role-Based Security Model
- 80%8.0
- Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
- 80%8.0
- Single Sign-On (SSO)
- 80%8.0
- Responsive Design for Web Access
- 100%10.0
- Mobile Application
- 80%8.0
- Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
- 100%10.0
- REST API
- N/AN/A
- Javascript API
- 90%9.0
- iFrames
- N/AN/A
- Java API
- N/AN/A
- Themeable User Interface (UI)
- N/AN/A
- Customizable Platform (Open Source)
- N/AN/A
- For their own Decision making process
- For business forecast
- For Reporting purpose
- To see dynamic dashboards for visual analysis
- For decision making process
- Earlier we were using SAP Business Objects for reporting purpose in which even a little change takes up a lot of time, but now after moving to Tableau it has become quite easy and time saving.
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
- Analyst Reports
- Third-party Reviews
- Implemented in-house
Setting up 4 environments(Dev, Build, UAT and Prod)
Setting up connection and creating Tableau extracts
building dashboards
Publishing, Security and maintainance
requests were very important. So every request has to go through a change request and approval only after that the changes use to go live.
- Several change requests were raised parallely so maintaing the que was getting difficult.
- We have to come up with a change window only when changes could be applied.
- We have to keep the timeline of changes so that it doesn't overlap with the previous request of the same dashboard.
- Online training
- Self-taught
- Building basic charts from already available show me is one of the quickest and easiest thing in any BI tool
- connecting to data is quite simple we don't need to write long queries(unless we want to).
- arranging sheets in the dashboard and using filters are just clicks away, anyone can do it by first chance only.
- Using calculated fields for special functionalities
- Understanding and using LOD functions can be cumbersome for new users
- building advanced graphs require a deep understanding of several advanced tableau features, which comes from regular uses.
Apart from this tableau features mobile specific dashboard building, like based on mobile screen size and resolution you can create your dashboard.
As i have used multiple Bi tools like QlikView and SAP BO, i can say all other tools take really long time in performing above functionalities except QlikView which is really fast in term of performing analysis.
- 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)
- Pixel Perfect reports
- 100%10.0
- Customizable dashboards
- 90%9.0
- Report Formatting Templates
- 80%8.0
- Drill-down analysis
- 90%9.0
- Formatting capabilities
- 90%9.0
- Integration with R or other statistical packages
- 100%10.0
- Report sharing and collaboration
- 100%10.0
- Publish to Web
- 100%10.0
- Publish to PDF
- 100%10.0
- Report Versioning
- 80%8.0
- Report Delivery Scheduling
- 70%7.0
- Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
- 80%8.0
- Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
- 90%9.0
- Predictive Analytics
- 70%7.0
- Multi-User Support (named login)
- 90%9.0
- Role-Based Security Model
- 80%8.0
- Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
- 90%9.0
- Responsive Design for Web Access
- 70%7.0
- Mobile Application
- N/AN/A
- Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
- 70%7.0
- Creating public dashboards to put on website
- replacing excel workbooks with tableau workbooks to make it more interactive than just slicers
- making colorful reports while still being colorblind friendly with a click of a button
- University Factbook
- Benchmarking dashboards for performance comparison using public datasets
- Performance benchmarking for IT staff
- The move from being a total SAS shop to having a product in the portfolio that is non very SAS supportive was the most unexpected move
- Publishing dashboards to our website without actually having a web programmer on board
- Capacity building model that helps us scale by making a small purchase and then growing the product use
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
- Prior Experience with the Product
- Analyst Reports
Scalable pricing model
Product reputation
- Implemented in-house
- Cost was transparent but cumbersome to come up with enterprise figures
- Need evaluation was an issue
Scalable
know your needs
- Creating charts
- developing dashboards
- building complicated joints in datasets when importing data
- exporting entire dashboard to pdf
- navigating the different filter types
Dashboard Experts, Scorecard Headaches
- 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.
- Pixel Perfect reports
- 70%7.0
- Customizable dashboards
- 100%10.0
- Report Formatting Templates
- 60%6.0
- Drill-down analysis
- 80%8.0
- Formatting capabilities
- 60%6.0
- Integration with R or other statistical packages
- 80%8.0
- Report sharing and collaboration
- 100%10.0
- Publish to Web
- 90%9.0
- Publish to PDF
- 90%9.0
- Report Delivery Scheduling
- 100%10.0
- Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
- 100%10.0
- Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
- 100%10.0
- Multi-User Support (named login)
- 80%8.0
- Role-Based Security Model
- 80%8.0
- Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
- 100%10.0
- Responsive Design for Web Access
- 90%9.0
- Mobile Application
- 80%8.0
- Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
- 60%6.0
- Inventory Dashboards
- Training Dashboards
- Executive Dashboards, 5 minutes to know how the business is doing. (Toothbrush Report)
- Field Management: Drill downs help to discover drivers of variation.
- Inventory Management: What's selling where, what are the trends.
- We used it to help validate some other reports the organization was creating in Excel.
- Vendor implemented
- Professional services company
- Not clear how much data Tableau Desktop could handle. Consultant led us to believe it could handle millions of lines, in practice it couldn't.
- Consultant wasn't up to speed with latest versions of Tableau Desktop.
- Consultant did not understand our business and a lot of time was lost helping him understand.
- Consultant was not an expert.
- Visualizations are easy to create.
- Easy to connect and refresh data sources
- Dashboard layout wasn't as easy as expected.
- Linking more then 2 - 3 datasets together gets messy
Perfect analytics tool
- Tableau is being used to retrieve data from multidimensional relational databases, spreadsheets and from cloud databases and then to present the data in visual format to the users in Sales, Marketing, Operations and Finance.
- Tableau is being used for analyzing sales metrics, capturing web data from customers and used for marketing analytics, reporting financial analysis data to senior management to visualize the performance of the company within a few minutes, instead of tedious report generating processes from other third party applications.
- We started using the latest version 8.0 and many of the features that we would be using were included in the latest release 8.0. Did not come across any areas that the product does less well, but we are somewhat new to Tableau and still trying out many features.
The primary factors for choosing Tableau were the licensing costs; ability to view data from multiple data sources; the ease of infrastructure to setup; and ability for users to create and maintain their own worksheets without the need for IT assistance.
With Tableau it allows us to mesh data from various data sources from Salesforce, Oracle, Web and Engineering servers.
Unlike some other tools that rely more heavily on IT resources, Tableau Desktop is easy to setup and configure and saves IT costs.
Analyst with technical background in data model and architecture proves to be an advantage when defining new data sources and how to establish connections to different data sources to pull the data into Tableau for analysis.
- We would be developing additional dashboards for supply chain to measure their metrics.
- Financial Analytics.
- Marketing and Sales Analytics.
- Operations Analytics.
- Engineering and Web Analytics.
- We had setup and developed database on Amazon RDS to store data from web analytics from the engineering servers, and meshed the data with CRM data in Salesforce to determine the potential customers for our cloud product.
- We had to create custom functions for the ones that Tableau did not have, and created views in Oracle database and used that as a source to publish analytics on Tableau.
Oracle discoverer had become outdated and did not have the functionality to publish dashboards. Users needed the ability to have dashboard capabilities to view, modify or update the worksheets on the dashboard instantly without the need for IT assistance.
Users now have the capability to view the published dashboards that were periodically synced with the latest data and had to just refresh the page to view the latest data rather than having to refresh the sheet in discoverer that usually took very long to view the data.
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
- Third-party Reviews
Users were able to create their own interactive sheets and publish those sheets for their teams to review the data. Along with the usability the price was also the factor in the decision.
- Implemented in-house
We evaluated the BI products to replace discoverer and adhoc reporting, and concentrated on financial reporting as the intial phase. We gathered the requirements for the financial reporting dashboard, and mapped the requirements with the Finance team. We had then designed the data model and views in Oracle, and had setup the data source on Tableau. Created the sheets and dashboard and published on the test instance of Tableau to review and refine the dashboard and finally had migrated the setups to the production instances.
We used the similar approach as above to publish dashboards for Sales and Marketing, Support cases and Engineering data.
- There was nothing major during the implementation, except Tableau had launched the newer version of the desktop and server during the implementation that had us upgrade and re-setup some of the configurations.
Tableau also has a user forum with most active and enthusiastic users out there who are always willing to help, and that would be a good source finding some key insights.
- Online training
- Self-taught
I would recommend going through the basics and then, once installed, it would be beneficial to go through the advanced training sessions and try them out.
- Salesforce
- Oracle E-Business Suite
- Amazon RDS
- Internal MySQL Engineering databases
- NetSuite
- File import/export
- Single Signon
- ETL tools
- We were able to use some of the additional functionality that came with the upgraded release that we saw limitations when developing sheets in the previous releases.
- We would like to see added functions within Tableau that would allow us to display the data without having to create custom objects in source database and pull the data into Tableau.
- We would like to see some temp table creation in Tableau to have perform calculations against the data and display the data without having to create the calculations in the source database.
"Tableau Desktop - Driving Organization Analytic Efficiency Engine"
- Good analytic Platform
- Versatile tool for visualization
- Very easy to create diverse visualization
- Flexible in terms of data source option from Excel to Microsoft cube
- No predictive analytical capabilities
- Statistically challenged and provides limited statistics functionality as compared to Microsoft Excel
- No version control, governance and other commonly desired enterprise features
- Pixel Perfect reports
- 40%4.0
- Customizable dashboards
- 60%6.0
- Report Formatting Templates
- 60%6.0
- Drill-down analysis
- 50%5.0
- Formatting capabilities
- 50%5.0
- Integration with R or other statistical packages
- 70%7.0
- Report sharing and collaboration
- 70%7.0
- Publish to Web
- 80%8.0
- Publish to PDF
- 80%8.0
- Report Delivery Scheduling
- 20%2.0
- Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
- 60%6.0
- Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
- 60%6.0
- Multi-User Support (named login)
- 60%6.0
- Role-Based Security Model
- 60%6.0
- Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
- 60%6.0
- Responsive Design for Web Access
- 30%3.0
- Mobile Application
- 50%5.0
- Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
- 60%6.0
- Predictive analytics
- Integration with Google maps or maps better than Map View or a native Tableau map
- Reporting
- Distribution analytics
- Transmission analytics
- Utility industry data availability
- We use it for clients who have difficulty visualizing the data and make sense out of the terabytes of data they already have.
- Developed dashboards to showcase our company strenghts
- Mostly, we use it for client needs. When they have very big set of data and want to see summary and want to solve some of the business challenges
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
- Implemented in-house
- Professional services company
- A server upgrade is cumbesome and licenses are very stringent
- Custom Visulaization
- UI Rich features such as gauges
- Visualization
- Connecting and Importing data from different sources
- Publishing to Tableau Server
- drag and drop features- Minimal coding
- Customized Reports
- Maps
- Cell coloring
- working with OLAP cube