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.
Tableau Desktop Feature Ratings
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
- 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
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
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