Why do organisations or people keep using Tableau instead of Power BI
March 06, 2017

Why do organisations or people keep using Tableau instead of Power BI

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Tableau Desktop

I have used Tableau Desktop for various projects related to data visualization and showing data analysis. It is very easy to develop various charts, using colour codes to distinguish various trends and has templates to complete the work.
  • Helps spot visual patterns correctly.
  • Apart from using an Excel you can also connect to your own data set or database to import large amounts of data and use it to drill down and prepare charts.
  • The charts and graphs made with Tableau are very interactive with the right information.
  • When data is highly granular Tableau must render and precisely place each element.
  • Green data fields are continuous and blue data fields are discrete. It is essential to understand what they do previously or else one can get confused. If you do not take Tableau video lessons or read about how the data fields with green or blue fields are different, it would be confusing. Tableau can improve that.
The reason I selected Tableau desktop was because it is so easy to use. You can easily download it, there are a large number of tutorials provided by Tableau that you can use to familiarise yourself with the tool. The learning curve for Tableau is less. I personally had a project due in morning and I was able to learn to use it in a span of 2 hours maximum. It has a variety of data visualisation techniques that make it very easy to represent large data and communicate its meaning.
In scenarios, where we have a lot of data and want to explain how this data affects a particular scenario, organisation, show customer segmentation, enable someone who is not aware in depth about data analytics we can use Tableau. What tableau does best is that it takes the data that needs to be processed or analysed and performs the SQL at the backend. So, for a person who does not understand SQL and cannot combine two tables or sets of data, it is very useful. Additionally Tableau also has a variety of ways the data can be filtered and represented by graphs. For example, in a scenario where we need to show sales of the company, showing large sets of data or Excel files cannot really give you an understanding of how well or bad it is going. So instead of a graph, representing sales monthly or quarterly can be created in Tableau for better understanding.

Tableau Desktop Feature Ratings

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