Getting the most out of small data in healthcare

We are very satisfied with what it has enabled us to do. The only factor in us not having more Tableau licenses has been budgetary constraints as a non-profit.

If you're in an organization that is all about having absolute command and control over the data and how it's used, Tableau may not be for you. Tableau has a commitment to democratizing data and an incredible focus on the user experience that is very much in line with our organizational values and goals. Tableau has made a business tool that is easy to use, incredibly powerful, and delightful to use. Doing exploratory analysis of fresh data with Tableau is like skiing in fresh powder, and Tableau Desktop is my favorite piece of software, ever.

My department was largely Excel and paper-based when I started, so there's been a tremendous amount of work to get the data into shape, so when I look at the overall implementation of our visualization and reporting infrastructure, I'm less satisfied. Tableau has been wonderful, the one place that would get me to a 10 is if it was easier to tune workbook performance on Tableau Server, there are a huge number of variables to deal with across the workbook/application/hardware stack. In a small environment like ours that takes more effort than I'd like.

First, a caveat: I'm someone who reads the manual, watches the videos, opens 20 tabs in my browser from a set of Google searches, and tries everything I can think of before contacting support. When I need Tableau tech support it's either for some newbie question that I missed the boat on (in which case support is awesome) or some deep in the weeds question about an undocumented piece of functionality that I might not be using for its intended purpose. I've sometimes had a hard time getting the first layer of support staff to understand what I'm doing, it seems like their knowledge isn't as solid as I'd like to be, and I chalk that up to Tableau's rapid growth. However, second level support has continued to be excellent.

While Tableau has the highest ease of use for analysis, the data set has to be ready for that and Tableau hasn't (yet) brought that ease of use to the ETL process.

I use Tableau for one to several hours per day, every day, and it almost never crashes. It's the most reliable piece of production software I've used.

While there are definitely cases where a user can do things that will make a particular worksheet or dashboard run slowly, overall the performance is extremely fast. The user experience of exploratory analysis particularly shines, there's nothing out there with the polish of Tableau.