Analytics with Tableau
We use Tableau to generate daily and weekly reports for our business module to generate our key performance indicators. These insights we …
Starting at $70 per month
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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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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
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
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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Product Details
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- Competitors
- Tech Details
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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 Types | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Mac |
| Mobile Application | No |
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 and Publish to Web highest, with a score of 9.3.
The most common users of Tableau Desktop are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(2262)Attribute Ratings
- 8.9Likelihood to Renew
- 8Availability
- 6.1Performance
- 8.6Usability
- 6.9Support Rating
- 8Online Training
- 9.4In-Person Training
- 8Implementation Rating
- 8.1Configurability
- 7Product Scalability
- 10Ease of integration
- 10Vendor pre-sale
- 10Vendor post-sale
- 9.2Data Visualization
- 7.9Data Sources
- 8.4Data Sharing and Collaboration
Reviews
(126-150 of 193)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
June 29, 2016
Tableau-University Use
- The functionality of dashboard gadgets is very easy and the data relationships are easy to understand.
- The visualization of dashboards is excellent. Tableau helps produce dashboards that are second-to-none in regards to the visualization and gadget presentation of its dashboards. A new user could understand how an existing dashboard works with very little time of use.
- The process of designing each dashboard is too complex and is too time consuming. Every little detail has to be added, which is slows the process down and takes away from the objective of the dashboard. There needs to be a faster way to design a dashboard.
- Tableau is very difficult to understand for first time users. It needs to be more user-friendly in terms of navigating through the software. It is difficult to differentiate exactly what the user is doing or wants to do.
June 27, 2016
The Current Leader in Visualization
- Visualization
- Data Filtration
- Basic Data Cleansing and Mashup
- Joining different data sets
- Publishing to more formats
- Increased flexibility to annotate visualizations
June 21, 2016
Tableau: Good but not idiot proof
- Great for geocoding/viewing content plotted on a map
- Analysis features are very powerful
- Data connectivity options are numerous
- Overly complex for the lay business user to connect to data
- Needs to save connections and credentials such that they can be re-used
June 09, 2016
Best data visualization and analytics tool out there
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- It helps me to analyze individual performance, for example of one of our hotels, compared with other Hilton hotels in the region.
- It helps me to visualize trends and identify outliers very easy. I can take action faster on any issue that I identify.
- Data visualization is the best thing Tableau does, also the availability to apply filters and date ranges on the flight is fantastic.
June 09, 2016
Increased productivity and client satisfaction
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Blending data from a variety of different sources such as SQL Server and CSV and Excel files. Allows you to get up and running quickly, without waiting for data integration, loading, etc.
- Ability to designate a column of data to be a dimension or a metric. Enables a whole new level of flexibility versus a pivot table!
- Drag-and-drop detail for pop-up text. Great way to annotate visual without extra work or consuming screen space.
- Linking filter actions across objects on a dashboard significantly enhances visualization and interaction for the user.
- Cannot put multiple metrics on the secondary vertical axis. Some workarounds available, but less than ideal.
- Wonderful feature of floating containers in dashboards, however, "No Fill" for background color is white, not transparent, which limits where you can float the containers.
- Metric calculations are SQL based, so more complex joins and formulas require custom SQL coding.
June 08, 2016
Tableau Desktop - Why & Why not?
- Creating visuals are very quick. Doesn't need much training. Anyone who can handle Excel can also handle Tableau visualization. The interface is well organized and everything is possible with less clicks. The default color layout & representation of graph & grid is very attractive. So excellent use experience.
- Data Source Connectivity- It provides lot of data source connection options. Tableau provides an option to connect to a file (Excel, Text, Access, CSV etc. ), connect to DataBase (Microsoft SQL Server Oracle, Amazon Redshift etc.), ODBC connections, Google Analytics, SAP HANA and many more.
- Excellent mobile support. Tableau put a lot of effort into developing a robust mobile client. Sensitive Control & Reports are pixel perfect.
- There is no concept of Change Management or versioning. The way it works is -i) Connect to your source ii) Build the reports in Desktop iii) Publish them online. Now for example if you did some modification & republished it, Tableau Online would always show the latest version. There is no way to retrieve the previous version of report.
- 3D Charts are not available
- Connecting live to Hadoop via ODBC driver is still painful because of its performance.
- Cost is high,this means you need to buy a Desktop license and server separately. The cost is a major factor desktop - $2000 with yearly maintenance paid upfront. This combined with maintenance of - $200, which you need to pay every year. This is per user.
- 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)
May 26, 2016
Tableau - the better BI tool
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Clean visualizations that are not cumbersome or dated.
- Exceptional presence on (windows) desktop, web and mobile (capability).
- Connects to a variety of disparate data sources.
- Faster enablement of reporting and analytics than other BI contenders.
- No OSX support (due 2014).
- Browser Authoring needs more maturity.
- Missing some visualizations (coming in 2014).
- Some of the sorting capabilities on calculated fields are limited.
- Not great if you're looking for Crystal Reports style static reporting production.
- Integration with portal systems.
May 25, 2016
Tableau Desktop reality revealed
- Connectivity to RDBMS, Excel, Files, Big Data. So a wide variety of data can be reported through Tableau.
- Tableau extracts can get the data out of source system and store it in the Tableau server or desktop user's machine to enhance the response time.
- Wide variety of analysis tips and pre-defined chart features that guide new users to create intuitive reports.
- Quick filter, easy to share and number of analytical functions to create custom calculations.
- Blending of sources can be enhanced to provide option for full outer blending.
- Join option between tables need to have more variety than equi-joins.
- Restriction of showing 16 distinct dimensional field in a report needs to be removed.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Drag and drop functionality allows a user that is comfortable with MS Excel pivot tables to shorten the learning curve.
- Ability to quickly build dashboards and publish them to Tableau server.
- Connecting to your data sources is simple and intuitive. You can connect to multiple data sources easily.
- If Tableau can make the desktop application web based that would make installation and upgrades much simpler.
May 24, 2016
Tableau Desktop for BI Professionials
- Easy for end users to use
- Straight forward for developers to set up
- Expensive
- The web client is clunky and often requires users to open in Tableau Desktop to use full range of features without bugs.
May 24, 2016
Tableau Makes Data Sexy!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Great user interface and easy to use.
- Great performance in large data volumes.
- Great for combining different data sources and consolidating into one for reporting.
- Fantastic visual data representation.
- None that I can think of.
May 24, 2016
Tableau for Analysis- great tool!
- It's effective to create custom dashboards.
- Syncs with your exicting data in any form, be it from Excel or your database.
- Report exporting.
- Sometimes it takes a long time for huge Excel files to import.
- Changing color or minute details like annotation on a specific aspect of say a bar chart is a problem.
- User Interface is awesome
- End user can also use it easily as it is intuitive and friendly with drag drop features.
- Lot variety of graphics and charts
- Showing simple table data in rows and columns is bit tedious. In other software we have straight table, cross table, graphical table. But tableau haven't given much attention. Many people want this simple things to show in table format (data as is)
- UI Alignment, layout adjustment in worksheet, dashboard, stories is sometime pretty difficult.
- User gets confused amongst worksheet, dashboard, stories as one can change individually and hence lost in synchronization of it. I think they can reduce so many various terms and stick to only one or 2 area where user can develop reports/charts/visuals.
- For each chart I have to create a sheet. So in big dashboard where there are 10s of pages each containing 4-5 charts. Imagine the maintenance load and effort to manage it. One can easily lost in so many Tableau sheets.
May 24, 2016
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.
- Rapid dashboard development. Tableau makes it extremely easy to visualize data in a multitude of ways and combine related pieces into a visually appealing dashboard for business users.
- Support for a wide array of data sources, the ability to blend or join data from disparate sources together.
- A large number of built-in chart and graph types to help users visualize data.
- global filters to quickly slice and dice data sets by whatever dimensions or metrics you desire.
- We have issues with Tableau calculating different attributes on date dimensions. Because of this, we've had to manually add additional fields to our date dimensional tables to support year over year reporting.
- Tableau server doesn't currently have support for business users creating their own calculated measures. This would be an extremely useful feature, especially for the users who we consider "power" users that want to perform further analysis on the reports the BI team provides.
- The live data streams seem to add a lot of overhead and really hinder the "interactivity" portion of the dashboards. Because of this, we've stuck mainly to using data extracts to ensure the dashboard interactivity is responsive.
- House large quantities of data
- Import various data sources
- Visually display and organize data in attractive and easy-to-use ways
- User access
- Ability to share
May 24, 2016
Tableau is great at showing your value
- Being able to provide key performing metrics much easier and quicker
- Reduced time building dashboards that would normally take hours or days
- Answers "what if" questions much easier and faster
- Although there are helpful links I can find via Google, I wish Tableau would make it easier to write calculated fields. For example, I needed to write a calculated field which included a parameter for percentage change in sales. Instead of using "excel" language in the IF, AND, OR I wish you could click on a button that answers your question and either walks you through on how to do it or basically does it what you ask it to do. I spend more time trying to figure out the field.
May 24, 2016
Data Analytic Queen
- Population Health - customizable, UTD data that makes findings visible.
- Real Time analytics and SQL compatibility.
- The ability to change variables and not skew the remainder of your variables in an environment.
- The ability to create custom fields for data
- Lack of reporting ability
May 24, 2016
Tableau Reporting
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Great at storing history of reporting, and pulling various reports by division and time frame.
- Sometimes hard to format reports to fit on page. Often end up with unnecessary blank pages at the end of some reports. Have tried changing page layout and formatting, but can't seem to get the appropriate fit.
May 24, 2016
Best report compilation software ever
- It lets people dive into tables/SQL without needing to know complex queries.
- It's easy to use and makes generating reports very easy.
- It was easy to set up and didnt require much maintenance.
- Getting it to do some things that seem easy end up being quite complex.
- Expensive.
May 24, 2016
The power tool of the digital analyst
- Slicing & dicing of data
- Visualization
- Ease of connectivity to Google Analytics (but always has a downside, see "Cons")
- Ease of connectivity to dispersed data sources
- The Google Analytics connector still needs an "advanced mode" where we would paste our own API request. The dumb-proofed interface turns out to be limiting for advanced users (doesn't allow dynamic segments, sometimes lag behind the official API).
- Data blending between dispersed data sources is often confusing and limiting.
- A built-in data-transformation step would be absolutely awesome - I often have to use an ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) tool to prep the data.
- Low cost.
- Self-service format, very easy to implement with minimal IT resources needed.
- Flexibility...and data visualization features are much better than expected.
- If original data sources change (e.g. field name change, field added/removed, file name change), it can be tricky to remap new names to previous ones without disrupting existing sheets, dashboards, and/or storyboards; of course, this issue likely exists with any comparable tool.
- Large datasets require extraction to minimize latency. Extraction can take several minutes. Again, this may be something most other tools encounter.
- Although I previously mentioned ease of implementation as a strength, there is a learning curve using Tableau Desktop. BUT, there are useful online instruction videos...and our Tableau account mgr is available for assistance.
May 24, 2016
Tableau - Great for business needs small to XL
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Mapping.
- SQL data extraction.
- Quick filters.
- The maps do not work unless your computer is connected to the internet; if the data is showing an extract why do I need to be connected to the internet
- An easier way to learn the Tableau code to build your own equations. You can google or buy SQL coding, VBA, etc. but you cannot easily find Tableau coding.
- An easier way to lock down the tabs used to make the dashboard.
May 24, 2016
If you have even a little budget for software, and think at all visually, just get Tableau, ok?
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Once data for a given analytics study is CLEAN, this is the fastest way to profile the data and "feel" it out. With a few iterations of looking at Tableau worksheets and massaging the data further, you can get a very good idea of what the data says in a broad sense as well as good places to check for anomalies.
- At the other end of the value chain, experts in Tableau can design very complex dashboards for clients. This part is harder, but allows the marriage of the data alongside its context. This lets clients who are subject matter experts rapidly understand what the data says without information overload or having to learn all kinds of technical stuff about the data.
- For visual thinkers, you can play around with the data fairly rapidly (make sure to create an extract to optimize the data model first). Most analytics tools are essentially programming platforms with varying amounts of lipstick atop the pig. In Tableau, it's quite a bit more intuitive.
- I here there's this thing out there called Microsoft Excel. I'm not sure if anyone has heard of it yet. This magical product has something like 90-95% of the functionality of Tableau at the marginal price of *free*.
- Tableau costs a lot of money, albeit less than the big legacy guys. In fact, you guys paying for SAS, SAP, generic "enterprise" analytics software, what does it feel like to fuel a barrel fire entirely with your project budget?