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Dashboard Experts, Scorecard Headaches
Updated May 24, 2016

Dashboard Experts, Scorecard Headaches

Phillip Smith | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Tableau Desktop

We used Tableau Desktop to write reports that we would later publish to Tableau Server. It was used to create sales dashboards and scorecards for the sales operations and field management teams.
  • Tableau Desktop has a great variety of visualizations. Once a dashboard is created refreshing the data is quick and easy.
  • The calculations in Tableau Desktop are easy and logical. It suggests as you type, making it quick and easy.
  • Parameters are very powerful ways to slice and filter the dashboards.
  • It's weak with Tabular reporting. It also won't let you reference a specific cell in the same table, making scorecards difficult.
  • It needs some more options on colors, shading, 3D, etc., to add variety to the visualizations.
  • Dashboard creation isn't as easy as it could be. Lining different elements up, centering, etc., was sometimes difficult.
QlikView is more customizable and has more depth, but is much harder to learn and much slower to develop. Tableau Desktop is much quicker to put together and if you have questions the community of support is much better. It doesn't handle as much data as QlikView does.
Tableau Desktop is great if you have simple and/or stable data sources. It's great for dashboards, but not scorecards. High level reporting with drill-down is great, but it does struggle on the drill down if the data is too granular or immense. Some aggregation is required to get speed. You'll love it as long as you're not trying to make it do more then it was intended for. It's not a one-size fits all reporting tool.

Tableau Desktop Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
7.7
Pixel Perfect reports
7
Customizable dashboards
10
Report Formatting Templates
6
8.0
Drill-down analysis
8
Formatting capabilities
6
Integration with R or other statistical packages
8
Report sharing and collaboration
10
9.3
Publish to Web
9
Publish to PDF
9
Report Delivery Scheduling
10
10.0
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
10
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
10
8.7
Multi-User Support (named login)
8
Role-Based Security Model
8
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
10
7.7
Responsive Design for Web Access
9
Mobile Application
8
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
6
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding ()
Not Rated

Using Tableau Desktop

10 - Executives and Field Mangement
3 - Need SQL skills, overall db knowledge. Good understanding of formulas and logic. Excel skills help.
  • Inventory Dashboards
  • Training Dashboards
  • Executive Dashboards, 5 minutes to know how the business is doing. (Toothbrush Report)
  • Field Management: Drill downs help to discover drivers of variation.
  • Inventory Management: What's selling where, what are the trends.
  • We used it to help validate some other reports the organization was creating in Excel.

Tableau Desktop Implementation

Time needs to be spent ahead of implementation to make sure data sources are set up and ready. Consultants need to understand the data sources and the goals before setting foot on-site. Installation is easy, learning to use it takes time. The training resources available are great.
  • Vendor implemented
  • Professional services company
Tableau sent out Slalom to implement.
No - We had a consultant on-site for two weeks.
Change management was a minor issue with the implementation - We had an organization that lives in Excel, getting them to trust a new tool as difficult.
  • Not clear how much data Tableau Desktop could handle. Consultant led us to believe it could handle millions of lines, in practice it couldn't.
  • Consultant wasn't up to speed with latest versions of Tableau Desktop.
  • Consultant did not understand our business and a lot of time was lost helping him understand.
  • Consultant was not an expert.

Using Tableau Desktop

Still requires a lot of work to create a good looking dashboard.
ProsCons
Like to use
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Feel confident using
Lots to learn
  • Visualizations are easy to create.
  • Easy to connect and refresh data sources
  • Dashboard layout wasn't as easy as expected.
  • Linking more then 2 - 3 datasets together gets messy