Tableau Desktop reality revealed
Updated May 25, 2016

Tableau Desktop reality revealed

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Tableau Desktop

Tableau Desktop is used as the BI tool for a group of 3000 end users and more than 300 developers in our organization. We moved out of tools like Cognos, BO to Tableau for all our reporting and analytic needs. Tableau is cost effective and useful for quick turn around and is very suitable for self service BI.
  • 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.
Tableau Desktop is better than any of its competitors as it is cost effective and user friendly.
Appropriate: SSBI, Agile projects, Analytical Reporting, Visualizations
Less Appropriate: Operational reporting, spreadsheet like flat reports

Tableau Desktop Feature Ratings

Pixel Perfect reports
8
Customizable dashboards
8
Report Formatting Templates
7
Drill-down analysis
7
Formatting capabilities
7
Integration with R or other statistical packages
7
Report sharing and collaboration
9
Publish to Web
10
Publish to PDF
10
Report Versioning
8
Report Delivery Scheduling
7
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
10
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
10
Predictive Analytics
9
Multi-User Support (named login)
9
Role-Based Security Model
8
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
7
Responsive Design for Web Access
8
Mobile Application
7
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
9

Tableau Desktop Implementation

Tableau desktop requires client installation and is used to create data sources and dashboard in tableau which can be published to the server. You can use tableau server's web edit functionality to modify reports on the server, but tableau desktop is needed for a rich report creation experience