The joyous ride to developing interactive dashboards with Tableau
May 31, 2016
The joyous ride to developing interactive dashboards with Tableau
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Tableau Desktop
We are constantly expanding the tool sets at our office so we can provide our users and stakeholders with richer more visually appealing information in a variety of formats. Tableau desktop helps us develop three such deliverable types in ou portfolio - an online public version of a dashboard, a securely sealed Cloud environment dashboard and an alternative to sending humongous Excel files by sending Tableau workbooks with Tableau reader instructions. All three are unique solutions in terms of data deliverables and though other softwares meet similar criteria, the data compression capability is no where close to Tableau workbooks.
- Data compression capability
- Snappier GUI interface for happier analyst experiences
- Leading the industry in visually appealing visuals
- Loads of customization possible
- Availability of loads of resources online
- Lots of users to share their experiences and problems online
- User service/support from Tableau after product sale needs improvement
- Many new generation visuals need to be added to defaults and automatic graphs (eg. Sankey, decision trees etc.)
- Industry specific solutions can help a lot
- Cost is very high (especially for higher education institutions and non-profits)
It is easier to start with Tableau. The out of the box ready feel is more with Tableau than any of the other BI products. Product scalability is at a steep cost with Tableau but it gives the possibility to begin small and then grow as it proves its capability as compared to all other products that need a massive single purchase. I love the fact that users come up to us and ask for reports in Tableau because it is so popular that lots of people have never used it but like to see their data reports in tableau just because they saw some other data report in tableau in a news article or somewhere else on a website.
Tableau Desktop Feature Ratings
Using Tableau Desktop
ETL data analyst, Data scientists, Predictive modelers, Directors, Asst Directors and even Asst VP
1 - None. Just search world wide web for solutions. Plenty of user experiences out there to support your users
- Creating public dashboards to put on website
- replacing excel workbooks with tableau workbooks to make it more interactive than just slicers
- making colorful reports while still being colorblind friendly with a click of a button
- University Factbook
- Benchmarking dashboards for performance comparison using public datasets
- Performance benchmarking for IT staff
- The move from being a total SAS shop to having a product in the portfolio that is non very SAS supportive was the most unexpected move
- Publishing dashboards to our website without actually having a web programmer on board
- Capacity building model that helps us scale by making a small purchase and then growing the product use
Evaluating Tableau Desktop and Competitors
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
- Prior Experience with the Product
- Analyst Reports
Capability to publishing to web
Scalable pricing model
Product reputation
Scalable pricing model
Product reputation
I would just make it faster. The process worked very slow in obtaining the product.
Tableau Desktop Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Change management was minimal
- Cost was transparent but cumbersome to come up with enterprise figures
- Need evaluation was an issue
Tableau Desktop Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution | None |
No - Non profits do not have that flexibility of paying for support
Product buy- My product buy cycle was as long as 2 years with so much analysis comparison and discussion done by the stakeholders one the worth of another BI spending. Tableau sales executive was patient and responsive enough to every nerdy question they were asked
Using Tableau Desktop
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | None |
- Creating charts
- developing dashboards
- building complicated joints in datasets when importing data
- exporting entire dashboard to pdf
- navigating the different filter types
Yes, but I don't use it