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Tableau Desktop Reviews

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Score 8.2 out of 100

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Reviews (1-25 of 147)

Ron Rothstain | TrustRadius Reviewer
December 09, 2019

Tableau Desktop - The nuts and bolts of it.

Ron Rothstain
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Love the interface. It's very smooth and easy to connect multiple numbers of data points
  • Provided a lot of self-learning tutorials which are easy to follow
  • You can display info in different ways (categorical versus numerical)
  • User friendly and has clean display
  • Sometimes takes a while to refresh
  • A bit expensive
  • Pullind data, particularly if you are not familiar with SQL or other query languages, can be a bit challenging
Read Ron Rothstain's full review
Simol Shah | TrustRadius Reviewer
December 09, 2019

Data management and visual precedence!

Simol Shah
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Pull-down menus and/or split commands for sorting and data manipulation.
  • Great pricing for the desktop version, online is still less preferable though.
  • Automatically connects .csv files instead of a browser.
  • Four-phase implementation training in order to understand all the processes to ensure literacy of the software could facilitate a better process.
  • To match queries it takes a lot of effort in data manipulation.
  • Courses and annual fees leave a strenuous bill burden on those who are beginning to implement the quota into their startup.
Read Simol Shah's full review
Benjamin Plotkin | TrustRadius Reviewer
October 07, 2019

Turn Tables Into Vistas of Visualization with Tableau Desktop

Benjamin Plotkin
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Tableau's suite of powerful data visualization tools allows users to create static and interactive dashboards with the ease of a drag-and-drop interface. It can help users avoid common data visualization pitfalls.
  • Tableau handily deals with millions of rows of data, from various data sources, including spreadsheets and SQL databases. This allows users to integrate disparate data sources that may have been difficult to connect otherwise.
  • Tableau's interface allows data analysts of all experience levels to quickly begin producing compelling and useful analysis and visualizations. As a user gains experience, Tableau's feature set continues to keep pace.
  • Pricing at scale is inordinately expensive. One must pay for the best, it seems, but better large-volume pricing would be appreciated!
  • When assembling a worksheet, there is only limited room for columns, and when that capacity is exceeded, columns are auto-collapsed into merged placeholders, which cannot be easily inspected.
  • Tableau is so feature-rich that it can feel impossible to master. While the vendor does provide training outreach, an emphasis on interactive tool-tips and other forms of "hands-on" training would be a welcome addition to the application.
Read Benjamin Plotkin's full review
John Rome | TrustRadius Reviewer
September 13, 2019

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

John Rome
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Visualization of data.
  • Easily connects to local or a variety of data sources or APIs.
  • Short learning curve to come up to speed.
  • The pricing model has been tricky at times.
  • Tableau corporation doesn't do a great job with the inventory of those who own licenses.
  • Performance has been an issue at times.
Read John Rome's full review
GH Powell | TrustRadius Reviewer
October 03, 2019

Still the Industry Standard for BI

GH Powell
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Lots of Data Connections
  • Easy Visualizations
  • Well supported in the community
  • Flexible tool - many ways to do things.
  • Error messaging is ambiguous
  • Confusing interface - many ways to do the same thing
  • Limited Crosstabs
  • Dashboard layouts don't allow cutting and pasting of objects
  • Despite what they try to demonstrate, big datasets still don't perform as quickly as you might expect them to
Read GH Powell's full review
Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
October 23, 2019

Great for Data-Viz-Wizzes, Painful for Others

Verified User
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Allows for complex dashboards to be made and then presented to less-technical audiences
  • Stories help highlight important information in the information, allowing a presentation to stand on its own without having to be explained in person
  • Recommends different visualizations based on the type of data inputted
  • Very steep learning curve for those who haven't used it previously.
  • Because it's a powerful tool, getting it to do simple things can be extremely difficult.
  • A jack-of-all-trades solution, sometimes it's hard to find or create industry-specific visualizations, such as NPS gauges.
Read this authenticated review
Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
February 11, 2020

Good for a lone wolf

Verified User
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Instantly changes views of data to slice and dice depending on need.
  • Map feature is fantastic.
  • Tableau is very customizable, which means that a lot of simple analytics tools have to be built from scratch.
  • Importing data is not always intuitive to a lay person like me.
Read this authenticated review
Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
September 19, 2019

The best tool for visualization and storytelling

Verified User
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Easy to import data from multiple sources
  • Easy to drag and drop and create various dimension
  • Easy to build a storyboard
  • A simple knowledgebank to get people started is essential.
  • The pricing could be slightly lower for individual users
  • The calculated fields could be made simpler
Read this authenticated review
Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
September 13, 2019

The Dominant Tool, But Will It Stay That Way?

Verified User
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Easy to learn.
  • Analyzes your data and recommends potential reports.
  • User-friendly interface.
  • Expensive compared to other tools.
  • Hooking into data beyond CSV can get complicated.
  • Entire Tableau ecosystem (Desktop, Server, etc) is overly complicated.
Read this authenticated review
Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
September 16, 2019

Tableau Desktop - iReviewed

Verified User
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Very user friendly, even a beginner would not have problem in understanding how to use it.
  • Various types of charts are available.
  • Sharing the dashboards is easy.
  • Creating a dashboard is pretty easy and only Tableau has storytelling options which have helped me in my presentations.
  • Raw data downloading behind the dashboard - The format of the data that we download would be in a very confusing format.
  • Format matching is pretty much manual for various charts that we create.
  • Data cleaning, wrangling & formatting has a lot of room for improvement.
  • Alerting system from the dashboard is not available yet.
Read this authenticated review
Clinton Shields | TrustRadius Reviewer
June 20, 2019

Visualization made simple, and complex!

Clinton Shields
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Easy to use
  • Plenty of Customization options
  • Can be quick to pick up for average users
  • Supports some complex analytics
  • Integrates well with other software
  • expensive
  • does require some workarounds to solve sometimes simple analytics
  • training for product is also very expensive
Read Clinton Shields's full review
Rahul Malik | TrustRadius Reviewer
August 09, 2019

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

Rahul Malik
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Tableau offers incredible data visualization tools and the ability to parse massive data-sets in a very limited time. Its plethora of different chart formats and tools allow you to show data almost any way, making it easy to adapt visualizations to differing needs and tastes.
  • Tableau is great for creating a combined dashboard with multiple databases as the source. This is one of the main features that the Tableau can connect to almost any data source and import the data easily and quickly.
  • The support for natural language query is invaluable. It helps people of all skill levels quickly discover actionable insights because they don't have to learn any particular language to get on-board with it.
  • The charts and graphics that tableau makes are easy for even nonanalytical people to understand, ideal for end-users of information as well.
  • When we are importing data from multiple sources and the data is huge, it sometimes tends to lag and have also crashed sometimes.
  • Tableau Desktop lacks the basic functionality of cleaning and prepping the data to be imported in Tableau Desktop. This is one of the major features which it lacks, you need additional support from Tableau to get these things added.
  • It has the annoying habit that saved database connections must be re-authenticated every time you open the program, which is a complete waste of time and effort to do it, again and again, each time.
Read Rahul Malik's full review
Akshaya Bhardwaj | TrustRadius Reviewer
July 17, 2019

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

Akshaya Bhardwaj
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • It creates good dashboards.
  • Selecting the fields and metrics is quite easy. We can create the formulas for presenting any variable.
  • We can use this tool with R studio and SQL, which I think is the major power of this tool.
  • We can process huge data in a very limited time.
  • Output delivery of charts is also very efficient. For example, we can take the PDF of the charts, which is good, from other tools.
  • More statistical functions need to be introduced in it.
  • We can not clean the data through this tool.
  • While taking the data from multiple sources, it hangs sometimes which sometimes crashes the whole system.
Read Akshaya Bhardwaj's full review
Jason Xiao | TrustRadius Reviewer
June 30, 2019

Tableau Review

Jason Xiao
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • User-friendly interface.
  • Good IT support and lots of resources.
  • Can publish reports to a server.
  • Quite expensive.
  • Limited functions in calculations.
  • Not support embedded SQL.
  • Not compatible well with Microsoft’s products.
Read Jason Xiao's full review
Michael Sadofyev | TrustRadius Reviewer
May 28, 2019

Basic desktop data science and analytics are now awalaible

Michael Sadofyev
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • After basic training users can operate with Tableau by themselves.
  • Tableau is good for evaluating base data analytics and data science tasks.
  • In comparison to Ms PowerBL: fewer visuals in Tableau.
  • Fewer free versions and support documentation/examples in Tableau rather than in PowerBI.
Read Michael Sadofyev's full review
Maddie Cheasick | TrustRadius Reviewer
May 22, 2019

Visualization is the Future

Maddie Cheasick
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • User-friendly, and made for visual learners.
  • The best tool for presentation purposes and actionable examples.
  • Good for using our data in a way that can be understood by everyone in the business.
  • It can be slow, as in loading slow and taking a while to switch from dashboard to dashboard.
Read Maddie Cheasick's full review
Tim Ryan | TrustRadius Reviewer
May 10, 2019

Easy to use and share reports

Tim Ryan
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Very easy UI for all level of users.
  • Easy to save/favorite different dashboards.
  • Granting access to different levels of users is easy.
  • You still need to have a fair amount of technical skills to set up some dashboards.
  • Drag and drop functionality could work a little easier.
  • Keep working on the UI.
Read Tim Ryan's full review
Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
July 15, 2019

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

Verified User
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Can process large amounts of data.
  • Has lots of data connections to feed data.
  • Easy to set up basic reports and dashboards.
  • The Online and Server products make Tableau easy to use and share work with large groups (or small groups).
  • Now has the backing of Saleforce and that admired company culture.
  • The cost for Desktop and Server is extremely cost prohibitive.
  • Tableau is quick to blame the users when performance and processing speeds are poor, but in reality, Tableau needs to work on making the application lighter and more powerful. There is a tool to evaluate performance on each workbook.
  • Needs more data connectors.
  • It takes advanced training/knowledge to create advanced reports and dashboards. If you use it every day you can become advanced in a few months.
  • Training documentation and access to trading materials are lacking. Maybe they want youtube to be the main source of training?
Read this authenticated review
Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
June 02, 2019

Best solution for BI (features + price)

Verified User
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • It is easy to use.
  • It has many data connections (data sources).
  • It is multilanguage.
  • Tableau is easy to learn.
  • It is difficult to configure page layouts.
  • Complex data sources correlations are difficult to create.
  • The price could be better when compared to competitors.
Read this authenticated review
Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
June 02, 2019

Great data tool if you know how to use it

Verified User
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Pulling data from multiple sources.
  • Can handle large data sources, unlike Excel.
  • Pivoting data in more dimensions than Excel.
  • Difficult to learn and use.
  • Requires a lot of skill to create more developed visualizations and automated reporting.
  • An extremely expensive and over the top solution for small businesses.
Read this authenticated review

Tableau Desktop Scorecard Summary

Likelihood to Recommend (1509)
8.2
Likelihood to Renew (39)
8.9
Usability (23)
8.9
Availability (10)
8.0
Performance (9)
6.1
Support (16)
9.0
In-Person Training (4)
9.4
Online Training (4)
8.0
Implementation (34)
8.0
Data Sharing and Collaboration (114)
8.1
Data Sources (114)
8.3
Product Scalability (3)
7.0

Feature Scorecard Summary

Pixel Perfect reports (100)
8.3
Customizable dashboards (119)
9.2
Report Formatting Templates (103)
7.9
Drill-down analysis (114)
8.6
Formatting capabilities (117)
8.4
Integration with R or other statistical packages (83)
7.8
Report sharing and collaboration (112)
8.2
Publish to Web (103)
8.7
Publish to PDF (105)
8.8
Report Versioning (75)
8.3
Report Delivery Scheduling (78)
8.6
Delivery to Remote Servers (33)
8.3
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.) (108)
8.4
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization (107)
8.6
Predictive Analytics (83)
7.8
Multi-User Support (named login) (96)
8.5
Role-Based Security Model (78)
8.3
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete) (85)
8.4
Single Sign-On (SSO) (35)
8.2
Responsive Design for Web Access (84)
8.4
Dedicated iOS Application (60)
7.9
Dedicated Android Application (53)
7.7
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile (77)
8.3
REST API (28)
8.1
Javascript API (27)
8.0
iFrames (25)
7.3
Java API (24)
7.7
Themeable User Interface (UI) (26)
8.1
Customizable Platform (Open Source) (22)
7.5

About Tableau Desktop

Tableau Desktop aims to allow people to make data-driven decisions with confidence, by helping them answer questions more quickly, solve harder problems more easily, and uncover new insights more frequently.

The vendor says that with a couple of clicks, 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 analysis. Interactive dashboards, drag and drop functionality, and natural language queries help users of all skill levels quickly discover actionable insights, all from an intuitive and visual interface. Users can ask deeper questions by quickly building powerful calculations, adding trend lines and seeing statistical summaries, or clustering data to see relationships.

Tableau's goal is to help people and organizations become more data-driven. With an integrated platform that is strives to be easy to start and scale, Tableau aims to support the entire analytics journey, from data preparation, to deep analysis, to the shared insights that drive the business forward.


Categories:  Data Discovery and Visualization,  Business Intelligence (BI)

Tableau Desktop Competitors

IBM Cognos, SAP Lumira Discovery, Qlik Sense, Microsoft Power BI, MicroStrategy Analytics, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform

Pricing

  • Has featureFree Trial Available?Yes
  • Has featureFree or Freemium Version Available?Yes
  • Has featurePremium Consulting/Integration Services Available?Yes
  • Entry-level set up fee?No

Free trials are available for both editions.

Tableau Desktop Technical Details

Deployment Types:On-premise
Operating Systems: Windows, Mac
Mobile Application:No