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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 (156)
    9.3
    93%
  • Drill-down analysis (158)
    9.2
    92%
  • Customizable dashboards (165)
    9.0
    90%
  • Formatting capabilities (161)
    8.9
    89%

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.

8.9
Avg 8.1

Report Output and Scheduling

Ability to schedule and manager report output.

8.8
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.

8.7
Avg 8.6

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

8.6
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 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

(2271)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(101-125 of 193)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
sanjeev pandey | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
This is the best tool if you want to get some dashboards really quickly. You will get all dimensions and measures separately along with the hierarchical information like date and time or the product and its subcategories. The visualization provided by it is really great. One area where I want improvement is its support for HTML, CSS and JavaScript so that it has more flexibility towards the other charting styles and client side validation for input parameters.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is particularly well suited for accessing reasonable denormalized Oracle database data, however it does equally well when accessing data in spreadsheets or other standard formats. The key question to ask would be how normalized is the data which the user wants to access, and if highly normalized whether some tables will need to be denormalized via new tables or views. It is also well suited organizations where there are a few super-users who can gather analytical and visualization requirements and then make these available to users of the information in the form of published dashboards. This works very well and keeps the total cost of ownership at a very reasonable level.
Charles Saulnier | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
With a well curated self-service environment, Talbeau Desktop can empower business users and add value soon after implementation. It is also well suited for intermediate and advanced users when end-users welcome visualization of data over tables. Strangely enough, it is often harder to build tables than visualizations in Tableau. I currently use version 9.3 of Tableau at work, we will soon migrate to version 10.2, therefore my comments do not reflect the latest version's characteristics.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In scenarios, where we have a lot of data and want to explain how this data affects a particular scenario, organisation, show customer segmentation, enable someone who is not aware in depth about data analytics we can use Tableau. What tableau does best is that it takes the data that needs to be processed or analysed and performs the SQL at the backend. So, for a person who does not understand SQL and cannot combine two tables or sets of data, it is very useful. Additionally Tableau also has a variety of ways the data can be filtered and represented by graphs. For example, in a scenario where we need to show sales of the company, showing large sets of data or Excel files cannot really give you an understanding of how well or bad it is going. So instead of a graph, representing sales monthly or quarterly can be created in Tableau for better understanding.
February 21, 2017

Tableau ease

MeghanMarie Fowler-Finn | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Tableau Desktop is suited for data visualizations that are complex but need to be drilled down into and seen at multiple levels detail. It is also suitable where multiple people might have different questions about the same data set using filters. Tableau Desktop is less appropriate for real time monitoring of multiple streams of data changing rapidly because it is too slow.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
If you have a lot of data and already use Excel on a daily basis to run reports or interpret data such as sales, marketing and other strategies for the business then this can help you excel in your position or even get you promoted faster as it can do wonders for what usually takes a lot of time to create.
February 09, 2017

Wonderful Tableau!

Agni G | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Appropriate: when we need to show animation (changes over a period of time or so), when we want to project scenarios over multiple locations, when we want to show developments or changes as a story, to handle large data. Not appropriate when: We need to show a lot of details in one screen, when we try to replicate the existing visualizations of some other tool
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Tableau is great for marketing situations where you need to allocate numbers fast and parse them even faster. It's a great storytelling tool for deep dive analysis but, it lacks creativity in visuals. If I were presenting visuals that required comparing metrics from one year to the next then Tableau doesn't suit my needs in my current role. I still have to build 2 sets of visuals for each branch on order to convey the message of growth.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We were satisfied enough with Tableau that it would take something pretty amazing to get me to switch away from it as a go-to visualization and analysis tool, or "pivot table on steroids". It's best suited though to situations where you have your data either in a single tabular format, or where you can run a single query against a single data source to get a single tabular format answer as the basis for generating your visualizations. Tableau does have a data blending feature that is useful, but if you use it when connecting to multiple large third-party data sources (for instance two connections to Google Analytics, one to get traffic metrics and one to get more detailed event counts and join them up on landing page, channel, etc...) then the data blending process can get pretty cumbersome. It's better to stage your data outside Tableau in one format (be it a single SQL database, CSV, or whatever) via some other ETL process than to try and get that done via data blending in Tableau.
October 18, 2016

Tableau Desktop Review

Andy G Teasdale | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It’s particularly useful for creating dashboards. While you don’t need to have a high level of skill to create reports you do need to have the knowledge about the underlying data. Tableau’s ability to create packaged workbooks allows the user to create the reports that can be sent to stakeholders who can then view and change filters in a usable way.
October 07, 2016

My Tableau Review

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Tableau is more useful: When the user base is less technical, doesn't have SQL knowledge, has to do data analysis for their day to day business. It reduces dependency on IT.

Tableau is less useful: When the IT team already provides business data insight using other BI tools in a much easy to comprehend dashboard format on time.

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
If you have specific questions, and you have a reasonable understanding of your data set Tableau Desktop works well. I found that there are things where I would rather go to Excel for a simple graph, but the moment I want to do something more challenging, or to process more data or bring sets of data together, something like Tableau is important to have.
David Shi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized

Very suited as a discovery tool that can double up for analysis and dashboard creation replacing older format reports such as Excel based spreadsheets; assuming the data being fed into application is massaged, structured and very 'clean'.

Not as well suited as a direct replacement for ad-hoc spreadsheet heavy tasks that is typically handled by the likes of Excel, where non-structured data can be easily manipulated.

Alex Naumov | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's a good entry-level visualization tool. It is well suited for smaller organizations, and well suited for smaller amounts of data - similar or slightly more than what Excel can handle. It's not well suited for larger companies with hundreds of users of the same reports/dashboards/analytics. It's very slow when published online as it queries the database for all requests. It's hard to build a suite of analytical views for multiple users.
Ravi Ada | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Business users love it because they don't have to depend on IT to support it. It creates that WOW factor. IT hates it because its deployed and used at a department level, and there is no control on who and how it's being used in the organization.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Tableau excels at providing dynamic insightful dashboards. I work with financial analysts that everyday send reports up to the CEO and other executives. They spend a frustrating amount of time updating multiple PowerPoint slides with several graphs on each one. With Tableau we turned those clunky, static, manual graphs in dynamic dashboards. They can be viewed from the mobile device of their choice; as well as change the sliders and filters on those dashboards to dig deeper into that data.
August 19, 2016

Big Data Made Pretty

Michael Fibison | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Very suited for cross referencing large data files such as consumer purchase data with a client's database.

We use Tableau to display monthly metrics/financials and that seems to be less purposeful. Excel can handle that just as easily so I have not seen the need to leverage Tableau other than it is prettier than Excel.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The scenarios where Tableau Desktop is well suited is we can connect to any type of data source. It allowed us to take our data and easily create intuitive visualizations. The scenarios where Tableau Desktop is less appropriate are when there is huge amount of data, Tableau is sluggish.
David Fickes | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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