If you have even a little budget for software, and think at all visually, just get Tableau, ok?
Updated May 24, 2016
If you have even a little budget for software, and think at all visually, just get Tableau, ok?
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Tableau Desktop
We are using Tableau Desktop to:
- Explore data as part of the initial analytics step once data is loaded, to guess at fruitful paths to do the "numbers stuff"
- Share our progress internally and get feedback (vs. displaying endless tables)
- Create fairly complex dashboards for the client
- Once data for a given analytics study is CLEAN, this is the fastest way to profile the data and "feel" it out. With a few iterations of looking at Tableau worksheets and massaging the data further, you can get a very good idea of what the data says in a broad sense as well as good places to check for anomalies.
- At the other end of the value chain, experts in Tableau can design very complex dashboards for clients. This part is harder, but allows the marriage of the data alongside its context. This lets clients who are subject matter experts rapidly understand what the data says without information overload or having to learn all kinds of technical stuff about the data.
- For visual thinkers, you can play around with the data fairly rapidly (make sure to create an extract to optimize the data model first). Most analytics tools are essentially programming platforms with varying amounts of lipstick atop the pig. In Tableau, it's quite a bit more intuitive.
- I here there's this thing out there called Microsoft Excel. I'm not sure if anyone has heard of it yet. This magical product has something like 90-95% of the functionality of Tableau at the marginal price of *free*.
- Tableau costs a lot of money, albeit less than the big legacy guys. In fact, you guys paying for SAS, SAP, generic "enterprise" analytics software, what does it feel like to fuel a barrel fire entirely with your project budget?
Excel is almost as good as Tableau. If you have a few thousand floating around just spring for the Tableau. QlikView is an abomination. Not much else to say there. SAS and friends are like ye olde-timey versions of Tableau in terms of their visualization abilities. Python, R, etc., allow you to go "hard core" in terms of visualization. Programming allows for more complex and precise scientific visualizations, but, obviously the business purpose is somewhat different.