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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 8.2

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

(51-75 of 194)
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February 11, 2020

Good for a lone wolf

Verified User
Analyst in Quality Assurance
Entertainment Company, 1001-5000 employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau Desktop can rescue millions of dollars in missing revenue. It can point out trends that nobody knew about. It can give you feedback that allows you to tweak business processes or online learning to better serve the organization. Tableau Desktop doesn't work with databases directly like Tableau Server, so it's not good for real-time applications. Data must be extracted, transformed and loaded.
December 09, 2019

Tableau Desktop - The nuts and bolts of it.

Ron Rothstain | TrustRadius Reviewer
Ron Rothstain
Assistant Director, Master of Science in Entrepreneurship and Innovation
USC Marshall School of Business (Higher Education, 10,001+ employees)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
It helps us to visualize and understand data. Helps in business analysis, predict market trends. Caters to the needs of an organization. Can be integrated with different kinds of data sources like Excel, CSV, different kinds of databases like Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle. On the other hand, need some understanding of statistics to use this software, cannot retrieve previous versions of the same file created. So, version management is a problem. Left joins cannot be created during data loading. These need to be created separately using blends.
December 09, 2019

Data management and visual precedence!

Simol Shah | TrustRadius Reviewer
Simol Shah
Quality Control Engineer
Amazon Web Services (AWS) (Consumer Services, 5001-10,000 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau Desktop is for the eager-minded intellect and those who have advanced data analytics expertise as the functions are almost mundane for them. The versatility of this platform is wide though, and accompany any seeker who wises to enhance their abilities and procure data in a more nuanced and specific fashion that may progress their data collection
October 23, 2019

Great for Data-Viz-Wizzes, Painful for Others

Verified User
Analyst in Marketing
Telecommunications Company, 201-500 employees
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau Desktop is well-suited to those who are very familiar with it. That sounds obvious, but truly it can work magic for those who know the ins and outs of it, more so than any other data-visualization tool I've seen. However, when you're not a viz-wiz, it can be extremely painful and very hard to learn how to work this beast. Getting from casual user to viz-wiz seems like an impossible task, even with the meager trainings that Tableau makes available.
October 07, 2019

Turn Tables Into Vistas of Visualization with Tableau Desktop

BP
Benjamin Plotkin
Technical Project Manager
California State University, Northridge (Education Management, 1001-5000 employees)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau Desktop is a great tool for merging a variety of data sources for custom reporting purposes, although like many Swiss army knives, it can be a pricey multi-tasker option that is only used for a single purpose. If you are not expanding beyond this basic use case, you are not getting proper value out of the application. If you can afford the pricing model, Tableau Desktop's visualizations are worth the spend!
September 19, 2019

The best tool for visualization and storytelling

Verified User
Partner in Product Management
Information Technology and Services Company, 51-200 employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau is really good if the company is serious about what they are doing.

There are instances where organizations do not have enough of a budget to invest in a visualization and storyboarding tool and hence like to go with open source tools. In such scenarios, considering the pricing of Tableau, it may not be appropriate.
September 18, 2019

Tableau is a sophisticated BI platform that's constantly improving

Verified User
Analyst in Finance and Accounting
Retail Company, 5001-10,000 employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
Well suited for larger organizations where ad-hoc reporting is less important than daily use of the same analytics. Not well suited for quick ad hoc analytics or teams not willing to learn. This is a program which favors the learning person.
September 16, 2019

Tableau Desktop - iReviewed

Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology
Financial Services Company, 1001-5000 employees
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau Desktop is well suited for dashboards that are real-time/near real-time or for weekly reporting purposes. If your business/team has some Key Performance Indicators that you want to monitor, Tableau Desktop is the option.

If you want to manipulate the data a lot, you may want to clean up the data before adding to the Tableau. Also, if you want any alerting system when any KPIs change a lot, Tableau may not be a good option.
September 13, 2019

The Dominant Tool, But Will It Stay That Way?

Verified User
Manager in Information Technology
Higher Education Company, 51-200 employees
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
For processing basic spreadsheet/CSV data, connecting to data is almost trivial. From there, if a user knows how to use a basic spreadsheet tool, Tableau has the built-in tools to show the user how to analyze the data. Even someone who is not visually inclined can create stunning reports that "wow" upper management.
September 13, 2019

Tableau Desktop still is my go-to product in a crowded BI tool market

John Rome | TrustRadius Reviewer
John Rome
Deputy CIO and BI Strategist
Arizona State University (Higher Education, 10,001+ employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
For pixel-perfect reports that are graphically beautiful, Tableau is one of the best on the market. It supports a lot of graphs and visualization, and you can even bring your own visuals. However, for more tabular data reporting (just data, not visualizations), it still needs a lot of improvement.
August 09, 2019

Tableau is the market leader when it comes to Interactive Data Analysis and Visualization

Rahul Malik | TrustRadius Reviewer
Rahul Malik
Senior Team Lead
Wipro Limited (Information Technology and Services, 10,001+ employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau Desktop is best suited when you want to create appealing and informative data visualizations. It is used extensively by organizations to draw conclusions and insights by feeding it with data from multiple sources and the source could be any back-end system, even cloud infrastructure. The graphics in Tableau are very simple and make it easy to get information across different groups of people. The brand new dashboard and story features where various worksheets can be combined to tell a story and that makes it different from the other similar software available in the market.
July 18, 2019

No tool is better than this for data visualization. A must have.

Akshaya Bhardwaj | TrustRadius Reviewer
Akshaya Bhardwaj
Consultant
WNS Global Services (Outsourcing/Offshoring, 10,001+ employees)
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
For performing the exploratory data analysis(EDA) through charts this is the best tool that is available in the market. For understanding the data i.e finding the insights so this leads. If you are working on data management, then you can not completely depend on this tool as data cleaning and data transforming is not possible through it. For drawing inferences, no one will suggest this tool.
July 15, 2019

Tableau is a good tool for those willing to invest the time

Verified User
Professional in Information Technology
Construction Company, 10,001+ employees
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
I would recommend Tableau be used in cases where there is a data connector if data is stored in a cloud. I wouldn't bother with Tableau if you use Microsoft Office 365, Azure, Dynamics as Power BI is becoming a complete equal at a lower cost.
June 30, 2019

Tableau Review

Jason Xiao | TrustRadius Reviewer
Jason Xiao
Senior Analyst, Fraud Data Science & Analytics
RBC (Banking, 10,001+ employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
Good use case: a large company which has sufficient funding in data visualization and has great needs in access control and web portal reports. Bad use case: not good for a small or medium company which has less funding in data visualization.
June 20, 2019

Visualization made simple, and complex!

Clinton Shields | TrustRadius Reviewer
Clinton Shields
Health Information Analytics Analyst
Kings View Community Services, Inc. (Hospital & Health Care, 201-500 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
Great for visualizing basic and complex analytics, can be very useful in a myriad of situations, for example it can be summarized up for grand views for executives and plenty of drill down opportunities for more analyst level staff. This allows the staff to performing the analytics to save time by not having to duplicate reports on different levels for different staff.
June 03, 2019

Best solution for BI (features + price)

Verified User
Team Lead in Information Technology
Machinery Company, 10,001+ employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
It is great for use as a data analysis tools in many domains, like Machine Learning and Data Warehouse. It is difficult to create complex scenarios, but when created they work very well. Tableau has good performance to generate graphics. For low-difficulty scenarios, the main problem is the price when compared to competitors, but if you have both cases inside the company it is a better tool than others.
June 02, 2019

Great data tool if you know how to use it

Verified User
Analyst in Marketing
Hospital & Health Care Company, 501-1000 employees
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
If you are a large company that is focused on providing data solutions to the market, Tableau may be the best option on the market for you. If you're a small company or agency, you might be able to find a solution available with Excel and save some money.
May 29, 2019

Basic desktop data science and analytics are now awalaible

Michael Sadofyev | TrustRadius Reviewer
Michael Sadofyev
Data Management & Blockchain Senior Manager
PwC (Accounting, 10,001+ employees)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
A good scenario for Tableau is the fast analysis and visualization of the amount of data that can't be analyzed with Ms Excel. The case of embedding Tableau in, for example, a web-page is not so convenient.
May 22, 2019

Visualization is the Future

Maddie Cheasick | TrustRadius Reviewer
Maddie Cheasick
Senior Sales Partnerships Specialist
Sojern (Marketing and Advertising, 201-500 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau Desktop is well suited for all sales teams, sales operations teams, and business development teams. It creates an environment when a salesperson has daily access to their achievement and can actively forecast their business.
May 21, 2019

Great visual tool for sharing data with others

Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology
Financial Services Company, 10,001+ employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
I think Tableau Desktop is well suited for data exploring to put a picture to data. Seeing data in a table doesn’t allow you to see outliers in the data. I think Tableau Desktop isn’t appropriate for having the ability to prep data for use in Desktop, but it integrates well into other tools.
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