Item: Tableau Desktop
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Tableau Desktop

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Tableau Desktop is being used as the primary business insights tool in our organization, so Tableau Desktop is used by our power users to build visualizations.

Pros and Cons

Pros

It's a highly flexible for building dashboards. Once you know how to use the tool, you can design a dashboard to look exactly how you want.
Has a broad range of data connection options.
An easy UI for joining datasets.

Cons

The learning curve is really steep. Even with online self-help resources and training modules, it takes a long time to learn fairly basic operations compared to other tools I've used. Basic operations in Tableau Desktop should really be simplified to acclimate new users.
I experience lots of unexplained connection errors and the error messages are really ambiguous. I've learned to keep retrying multiple times and that often resolves the error, but sometimes if a workbook has been inactive for a while, the only way to resolve the connection error is to restart Tableau Desktop. That is really buggy behavior, and I have wasted a lot of time (as have many colleagues of mine) trying to decipher these errors. This really needs to be fixed.
The application runs really slowly. I have a powerful PC, but Tableau Desktop really saps its resources. The previous BI tool we used was cloud-based, so this was a big adjustment moving to this resource-intensive thick client. I think it should be optimized to run faster. I spend too much time waiting.

I'm a user that has many responsibilities, and one of them is setting up visuals for business insights. Because I'm not a daily user of Tableau, I find myself constantly having to re-learn certain functions because there are so many options it's very hard to find what I'm looking for. I have had a much better experience, as a non-analyst user, with another tool (Domo). I can see Tableau Desktop is a powerful tool, but I find the user experience very frustrating.

Other Software Used

Domo

Likelihood to Recommend

Tableau Desktop seems best suited to organizations that have dedicated data analysts with the time to spend significant time learning the product. My organization has a lot of "business users" who need to use the tool to produce dashboards but are not dedicated analysts (myself included), so the steep learning curve is frustrating and I am constantly reminded that I need to spend more time (that I don't have) learning the tool just so I can use it effectively. If your organization has lots of "jacks/Jills of all trades" that need a BI tool with easy user experience, there are better tools out there. If you have dedicated personnel with deep technical knowledge on data structure and analysis, Tableau Desktop could be a great tool for you, because it definitely has robust capabilities once you spend the time to learn them.

Tableau Desktop Feature Ratings

Comments

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Very robust BI tool, but a steep learning curve. Be sure to dedicate enough time to learn it well!