Item: Tableau Desktop
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Tableau Desktop

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Alternatives Considered

TIBCO Data Virtualization and Microsoft BI

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.

Other Software Used

Adobe Marketing Cloud, Microsoft 365 Business, Adobe Photoshop

Likelihood to Recommend

Tableau Desktop is great for building dashboards that you use yourself. It gets a little harder to use when you want to share dashboards with others. The data that you use in Tableau should already be clean and structured, so if you don't have that or don't have support to get that, you'll need more than just Tableau to be able to use it. There is a bit of a learning curve if you're new to BI or data visualization, but with practice and training, it becomes a very valuable asset for analysis.

Tableau Desktop Feature Ratings

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation

Tableau Desktop great for individual users