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Tableau Desktop - Leader of the pack
September 16, 2016

Tableau Desktop - Leader of the pack

David Shi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Tableau Desktop

It is used across many departments across the whole organisation. The business problems addressed include being used as a visual analysis tool in conjunction with other traditional applications such as Excel, where it's geographical capabilities can easily visually aid and identify in any analysis work where locale is a useful metric, as well as creation of dashboards for numerous stakeholders to consume where traditional rigid reports are replaced with interactive and user security enabled dashboards.
  • User friendly interface, easy to take up.
  • Numerous updates, throughout the years I've used tableau, many new features have been added.
  • Looks great out of the box, saves time on formatting.
  • Licensing is still difficult to explain to new users/stakeholders - could be simplified.
  • Lack of backward compatibility, where version 10 worksheets can't be opened by version 9 applications.
  • Can be pricey for smaller organisations.
  • Saves analysts tremendous amounts of time from authoring/formatting/distributing traditional rigid reports in Excel.
  • Enhances skill sets of users to better understand how data is structured and its impact on business in areas previously 'invisible' using traditional wall of text reports, resulting in 'cleaner' data which gives more visibility to all areas previously deemed not relevant.
  • Ability to answer business questions quickly and allow rapid prototyping of dashboards which gives stakeholders much faster turnaround time to reach decisions.
Tableau is clearly the most intuitive and best looking product out of the box. Whereas other competitors appear to be playing catch up with Tableau.

It also has the biggest online community which enables new users to become proficient in this application very quickly. It also serves as a portal to share and discover new ways to do things, which is something that simply does not happen with competitors that have little to almost non-existent online communities.

Very suited as a discovery tool that can double up for analysis and dashboard creation replacing older format reports such as Excel based spreadsheets; assuming the data being fed into application is massaged, structured and very 'clean'.


Not as well suited as a direct replacement for ad-hoc spreadsheet heavy tasks that is typically handled by the likes of Excel, where non-structured data can be easily manipulated.

Tableau Desktop Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
9.5
Pixel Perfect reports
9
Customizable dashboards
10
Report Formatting Templates
Not Rated
8.5
Drill-down analysis
10
Formatting capabilities
8
Integration with R or other statistical packages
7
Report sharing and collaboration
9
8.0
Publish to Web
10
Publish to PDF
7
Report Versioning
Not Rated
Report Delivery Scheduling
7
8.7
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
10
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
10
Predictive Analytics
6
9.0
Multi-User Support (named login)
9
Role-Based Security Model
9
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
9
9.0
Responsive Design for Web Access
9
Mobile Application
9
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
9
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding ()
Not Rated

Using Tableau Desktop

Group strategy & analytics, business on-boarding, workforce management, digital drivers, capacity creation.
10 - 
  • Existing experience with tableau, moderate understanding of relational databases and data. Microsoft Excel skills can also help get the users up to speed but not necessary.
  • Will suit any users from analytical and/or reporting backgrounds, visual analytics experience also helpful but not necessary.
  • Users with statistical background also helpful, but not always applicable depending on industry.
  • Authoring and distribution of reports/dashboards to specific stakeholders with in-built user security.
  • Replacement of existing Excel spreadsheets done in a manual and error prone fashion with automated and error free alternative.
  • Used as a tool to identify trends based on geographical dimensions and measures.
  • More geographical related analysis for trends.
As it's currently rolled out across many departments of the organisation, with the current level of user feedback (which is very satisfactory) there is no reason to look for other products to replace this application as Tableau currently fulfills all of the organisational needs and competitors are still lagging behind based on latest versions.