Very robust BI tool, but a steep learning curve. Be sure to dedicate enough time to learn it well!
May 18, 2019
Very robust BI tool, but a steep learning curve. Be sure to dedicate enough time to learn it well!
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Tableau Desktop
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.
- 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.
- 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.