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Tableau Desktop Review
Updated November 21, 2014

Tableau Desktop Review

Paul Lisborg | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

8.1 & 8.2

Overall Satisfaction with Tableau Desktop

Tableau has been selected as the BI tool for visualizing data across the entire organization. Currently, the tool is assisting us in understanding our sales, procurement, and asset management data. In the future, it will also assist us with marketing and logistics.
  • Tableau Desktop is intuitive and requires little training for novice users.
  • At my previous employer, we were able to instantly understand our inbound call center calls with only 15 minutes of dashboard development.
  • The developers at Tableau have successfully produced a product that is fast and easy to use.
  • Sorting and/or Ranking can be a challenge to understand. The ability to easily sort by a field (even if within a hierarchy) would be beneficial.
  • Although not primarily designed to produce printed reports, it would benefit users to have a "Print Preview" button.
Tableau is intuitive and does not require extensive training or coding. After highlighting the dimensions and measures you are interested in viewing, Tableau provides a “Show Me” shelf which automatically suggests the best-practice graph for viewing the data. Interactivity/Actions can be generated within your dashboard using a one-click button. For the more experienced developer, Tableau provides the ability to add complex row and table calculations. It also allows users to develop and customize the SQL queries behind the data source.
Tableau is an awesome tool with a great staff and user community. I can't image visualizing data without the use of this tool.
Tableau is perfect for investigating both structured and raw data sets. As with any data visualization tool, you must have a clear understanding of your data and what your stakeholders expect within their visualizations. To effectively maximize rendering times, have data aggregated to the lowest level that users wish to investigate. Tableau’s data blending is a great feature, but it is not intended to replicate SQL joins.

Using Tableau Desktop

10 - 10 Business Analysts currently use Tableau Desktop with 130+ server users. Business functions include operations, finance, and sales. Dashboards are used to monitor sales and budgets, production equipment, Concur T&E, finance metrics, and shipping logistics. We have just introduced a new self-serve dashboard (using Tableau's web authoring feature) that will all users to quickly view data from a predefined extract. This will allow non-technical business users to quickly and efficiently interrogate their data.