1. Home
  2. Business Intelligence (BI) Tools
  3. Tableau Desktop Reviews
  4. User Review of Tableau Desktop
Powerful but Easy Insight for All Skill Levels
June 21, 2013

Powerful but Easy Insight for All Skill Levels

Jon Boeckenstedt | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

8.0

Overall Satisfaction

  • Tableau allows us to connect to almost any data set we can muster without translating or restructuing
  • It allows end users who are business experts but not technical experts to explore and visualize data in ways that are visually rich, compelling, and highly communicative
  • Can't think of any
We are widely implemented and use continues to grow as more people discover it. It has widespread adoption and very high end user satisfaction.

Product Usage

100 - All aspects of the university: Admissions, Financial Aid, Academic Affairs, Business Operations, IT, Student Affairs.
1 - A server admin who does this as a part of his duty; in FTE the actual number is less than one.
  • Easily publishable and shareable dashboards
  • Critical, time-sensitive ad-hoc reports
  • Engenders a sense of curiosity about data among young staff

Evaluation and Selection

Excel
Although I evaluated Omniscope, several versions of Xcelsisus, and have since looked at Qlikview, I find that Tableau offers extraordinary power to the end user; that is, the people who know the business best. This is true and especially important for non-technical business experts.

Implementation

Our IT Staff implemented server and does upgrades, and we've had only minor glitches, all of which are quickly resolved.
  • Implemented in-house

Training

  • Online training
  • In-person training
  • Self-taught
It is admittedly hard to train a group of people with disparate levels of ability coming in, but the software is so easy to use that this is not a huge problem; anyone who can follow simple instructions can catch up pretty quickly.
Videos online are exceptionally thorough.
I would recommend a few videos, then exploration, then videos and then the community.

Support

The email and call support is exceptional; although I have had few problems, they are usually solved within an hour. In addition, Tableau has developed a large and knowledgeable community of users who help each other, and I find them to be among the best spokespeople for the software.
No - Not available, but not needed.

Usability

The training videos on the website make the software seem exceptionally easy. In fact, in real life it's even easier.

Reliability

Other than upgrades, we've never had downtime that I'm aware of.
Recent versions have improved speed dramatically, and the data engine that is built in can sort through millions of rows of data in very short time.

Vendor Relationship

Exceptional. We had the phone numbers of the VP for sales, and found negotiation very easy.