Tableau Desktop great for individual users
December 22, 2018
Tableau Desktop great for individual users
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Tableau Desktop
Internally, Tableau is mainly used by the analytics team, but we have had some cross-department adoption. Externally, our clients use the dashboards our team produces across multiple business functions. It really depends on the client and how much they are dedicated to investing in the platform at an organizational level. It's mixed between companies with only 1 or 2 stakeholders that care about dashboards, to companies that use Tableau across the organization.
- Tableau allows me to quickly explore a dataset and find meaningful visualizations and segments in the data. I find that it's the tool I turn to when I have a fresh set of data and need to quickly pick apart what's important to know about that data.
- A lot of my business stakeholders can't understand data without being able to see a visualization. Tableau enables me to take structured data and build those visualizations much faster than something like Excel.
- I enjoy the flexibility in being able to create calculated metrics within the tool. This saves several steps in creating those new metrics within the raw data. The calculated metrics are robust, allowing you to write logic to get at the data that you really need.
- I spend a lot of time customizing dashboards for clients to match their branding and aesthetic. The one particularly annoying thing is not being able to change the font colors on the y-axis labels. It seems so simple, but there's honestly no way to do it!
- I work from a laptop that is a few years old. Tableau software is not a light program and I often run into system memory issues when I'm running Tableau Desktop along with other programs. I probably just need a faster computer, but IT has budget constraints and I'm not sure when I'll get a PC upgrade.
- Sometimes I could spend a lot of time just trying to find a feature in the tool. Like a lot of other Tableau users, I end up googling my question and finding the answer on a community post or YouTube channel. I know it's not just me, as sometimes formatting and customization are not very straightforward.
Tableau has a great community engagement, and it's really great to find and connect with other Tableau users. I think that really sets them apart from other tools, where Tableau has invested in empowering local user groups and supporting users online through the Tableau community forum.