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Your business NEEDS Tableau
Updated May 24, 2016

Your business NEEDS Tableau

Matthew McLaughlin | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Tableau Desktop

Tableau Desktop is used across our entire organization for measuring supplier shipment and quality performance, and manufacturing performance. Being able to schedule extracts and automate dashboard refreshes is a huge timesaver!
  • Very easy to set up, install, configure and use.
  • User community is extremely active - posting questions on their forums usually results in an answer in under an hour!
  • Tableau has hours of free training videos on demand and many more free live training sessions.
  • Cost is a little high for some businesses.
  • ODBC is not really supported. I understand why since there could be thousands of drivers 'in the wild'.
I had the trial version of Tableau Desktop downloaded, installed, configured and was creating meaningful dashboards in almost 15 minutes. While other software we used had great features, none of them were able to compare with this trial experience. Tableau's user forums were very active, with many users able to help with any issue I had. Additionally, the free tutorial videos can't be beat! Nobody else offers that kind of resource.
It is most suited for automating data extracts and refreshes of dashboards from disparate data sources. Tableau Desktop makes it easy to take my ERP system, data from SQL server and local MS Excel files and use them seamlessly. It is not well suited for traditional 'tabular' reports. Instead of looking at what has happened, look to see what will happen. Tableau can do that.

Tableau Desktop Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
7.3
Pixel Perfect reports
9
Customizable dashboards
9
Report Formatting Templates
4
9.3
Drill-down analysis
10
Formatting capabilities
9
Integration with R or other statistical packages
Not Rated
Report sharing and collaboration
9
10.0
Publish to Web
Not Rated
Publish to PDF
10
Report Versioning
Not Rated
Report Delivery Scheduling
10
10.0
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
10
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
10
Predictive Analytics
10
9.3
Multi-User Support (named login)
10
Role-Based Security Model
10
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
8
10.0
Responsive Design for Web Access
10
Mobile Application
10
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
10
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding ()
Not Rated

Tableau Desktop Implementation

Using Tableau Desktop

It's pretty easy to use Tableau...you need to have your data formatted properly before you try. Since the majority of calculations are written almost exactly as you would in Excel, the learning curve is quite shallow.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • Charting is the easiest
  • Most calculations are very similar to Excel
  • Table calculations require some reading-up
Yes, but I don't use it