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)8.989%
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.
- 8.9Formatting capabilities(161) Ratings
Ability to format output e.g. conditional formatting, lines, headers, footers.
- 8.3Integration 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.
- 9.2Publish to Web(148) Ratings
- 8.4Publish to PDF(148) Ratings
- 8.6Report Versioning(115) Ratings
Report versioning is the assignment of version numbers to each version of a report to help in tracking.
- 9.1Report 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
- 8.5REST 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
- 8.8iFrames(48) Ratings
An iFrame is an HTML document embedded inside another HTML document on a website
- 8.7Java API(45) Ratings
A Java application programming interface (API) is a list of all classes that are part of the Java development kit (JDK)
- 8.4Themeable 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
(2270)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
(1-4 of 4)Worked superbly for analyzing web traffic data.
- Tableau is an excellent tool for quickly making sense of millions of rows of data. It does an excellent job of recognizing facts and dimensions in denormalized data files (say CSV or Excel) as well as connecting to larger databases. The learning curve is slight but not too steep if you are comfortable with Excel Pivot Tables or similar.
- The visualizations are particularly good as well, as there is a good library of them as well as an auto-suggest feature that for a given series of dimensions and metrics will recommend what chart types might apply. If you have data it recognizes (or is typed) as zip codes for instance it will recommend a geospatial / map visualization.
- If you have broader enterprise needs for data security and segmentation, heavy duty report customization, or data transformation, this is less comprehensive a tool than other enterprise BI packages (e.g. Business Objects, MicroStrategy, or similar). That said, what it does, it does amazingly well and at a tremendous value.
- One minor annoyance is that formatting applied to a workbook doesn't carry throughout or get remembered as a template. The default choices for font sizes tend not to export well to presentations or printed text, and having to hand-enlarge every axis label every time gets obnoxious. I've seen third-party tools developed specifically for re-using formatting selections across one or multiple workbooks.
- ETL Capability
- N/AN/A
- Pixel Perfect reports
- 70%7.0
- Customizable dashboards
- 80%8.0
- Report Formatting Templates
- 50%5.0
- Drill-down analysis
- 100%10.0
- Formatting capabilities
- 70%7.0
- Integration with R or other statistical packages
- N/AN/A
- Report sharing and collaboration
- 60%6.0
- Publish to PDF
- 70%7.0
- Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
- 100%10.0
- Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
- 100%10.0
- Predictive Analytics
- N/AN/A
- Mobile Application
- N/AN/A
- Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
- N/AN/A
- Business Analytics (primarily management and visualization definition)
- Finance (report definition and execution to PDF etc.)
- Business Development (interactive use of dashboards)
- As we moved into CPC ads, we might have used Tableau as a quick and dirty ad spend optimization tool by driving into traffic and conversion metrics tied to actual conversion values (the high-level flat dollar amounts you can specify in Google Analytics wouldn't work for our real-time bidding platform we would need to mash up data from Google AdWords and our operational systems and Tableau is excellent at that)
- We used Tableau to analyze web traffic data, including traffic channels and sources, the conversion funnel, inventory mix and categorization, geographic distribution of inventory and inbound traffic and leads, on a dataset of millions to tens of millions of rows.
- We also used Tableau to report on operating metric performance to plan though it provided less unique value in that situation
- We were able to very quickly generate geographic heatmaps showing automobile inventories across the US, including the ability to filter/drill on various makes/models
- Similarly we could generate heatmaps across the US to indicate where web traffic was originating
- Finally, using calculated fields to mash those two up we could quickly and visually pinpoint where supply/demand imbalances existed to direct our business development efforts (e.g. we need more Toyota dealers providing inventory in Atlanta, and we need to target driving more traffic on BMW related search terms in Chicago, etc.)
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
Tableau Desktop, however, has an elegant simplicity that makes it easier to come up the learning curve and start performing more advanced analyses more quickly. That was the main factor driving our decision. The reasonable pricing and very helpful sales process were added bonuses.
- Implemented in-house
- Self-taught
- Drag and drop of dimensions and measures
- Styling of visualizations of all different types is easy
- Assembling charts and graphs into composite dashboards
- There are a few things that should be simple that are cumbersome like data blending can be painful to get right and details like totals on top of stacked bars
- Formatting does not carry over from sheet to sheet and styles cannot be universally applied to a single visualization much less a dashboard -- lots of repetitive manual work to style things visually
- MySQL Database
Every time I've upgraded it has been completely seamless and I've never felt lost, experienced migration headaches or data loss. It's a real tribute to the quality of Tableau Desktop that every upgrade has been so quick and painless.
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.
100 Reasons why Tableau can help you!
- Tableau is extremely good at turning large amounts of data into useful analyses. Once you are comfortable with the tool, you are rarely more than a few clicks away from a useful visualization/analysis.
- Tableau's simple, clean, drag-and-drop interface allows for a business to go from 0-60 in record time. There are many types of useful analyses that can be done with no IT knowledge at all. For example, a business analysis can slice his/her Sales or Profits in almost any fashion simply with a few clicks.
- Tableau is exceptional at answering the five basic questions "Who?", "What?", "When?", "Where?", and "How?". If you can phrase your problem as one of these five questions, then Tableau will likely be of great value to you.
- Tableau is somewhat restrictive in the type of data it will work with. It likes relatively clean data in a tabular format. This means records on the Rows and values on the Columns. If your data is very messy/inaccurate, then Tableau has limited ability to deal with this easily. There are other tools on the market that are designed to help you clean/reformat your data. Tableau is a visualization/analytics tool, and a great one at that! Use it for its strengths.
- It is very difficult to quantify the effect that using Tableau has had on our clients. The one major benefit I can think of is the reduction of operational expenses. Tableau allows them to keep one person who maintains ten dashboards instead of the twenty people it took when they were using Excel.
- Having a series of relevant, automatically refreshing dashboards allows for "quick response" to business problems, which could save tremendous amounts of money. If a problem is occurring, you would see it on your dashboard the next day, instead of an analyst finding it a month later.
- We use this product to help a Shipping client examine an automatically refreshing set of about 60 KPI's. This client has users all way from Business Analysts to Senior Executives.
- We use this product to help multiple Retail clients slice-and-dice their sales data. They can now answer questions such as "What are people buying?", "Who are we selling to?", and "How much are they buying?"
- We use this product to help an Equipment Repair client track how all of their equipment nationwide is operating from one central, automatically refreshing, location. They also use this product to handle most of their ad-hoc reporting needs.
- Implemented in-house
- Self-taught
- We have integrated Tableau with virtually every tool in the Microsoft Eco-system. This includes SQL Server, SQL Server Analysis Services, Power Pivot and Excel.
- Tableau offers this same connectivity to many other data sources. Odds are very good it can connect to your data as well.
- I can't think of a single system that Tableau cannot already connect to.
Tableau 8.0 Review - Be a Data Rockstar
- Tableau is a very well rounded tool for creating action based analysis and visualizations of data against multiple datasets / data types. It is a much more user friendly interface for people with varying levels of software and analysis experience. Much more so than many other tools on the market. Tableau is click and drag whereas others require knowledge of SQL, ETL and Database administration. Not to say that you can't take Tableau to the next level by employing SQL scripts and ETL tools but it's not necessary. Tableau can analyze data in Excel or Access as well as be pointed to enterprise database solutions like Oracle or SQL Server. It can even be pointed to the cloud and analyze things like Google Data. It can crunch through giant data sets with no issues whatsoever. The visualization graphics and maps are excellent. We've had "bake off" sessions with other tools like QlikView and you can churn out things in Tableau in a third of the time as someone else using QlikView.
- Nothing that I have seen. I've used it in many capacities for both reporting internal to an organization as well as publishing interactive reports and analysis out to customers for their own analysis.
- Much of this is confidential to our business, but there is a definitive savings in man hours in regards to the amount of time it takes to create advanced action based visualizations of logistics, inventory and forecast data. It is easy to use the tool to pick out visual patterns where there may be issues with shipping lanes, carriers, item inventory or sales spikes etc.... Those all have monetary impacts to them.
- Analysis in the areas of: Logistics, Forecasting, Demand, Sales. There's no data Tableau can't visualize in a meaningful fashion
- Implemented in-house
- Online training
- In-person training
- Self-taught
- Oracle and SQL Server.
- No.