Tableau is widely used, but needs more support and functionality
March 06, 2022

Tableau is widely used, but needs more support and functionality

Jeremy Pierce, MBA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Tableau Desktop

We use Tableau Desktop to prepare data sources and dashboards in our organization. We are able to solve simple business problems & use cases with Tableau Desktop. We are able to analyze & share our data points both within teams and with external teams. We are able to monitor data as it comes in and analyze trends quickly & easily.

Pros

  • Nearly pixel perfect graphs
  • Easily switch from visualizing data to presenting just numbers
  • So many data point connectors. If you have data, it'll connect to it.

Cons

  • So many moving points to make a detailed graph.
  • The visualizations are very rudimentary which leads to analysts creating multiple visualizations to overlay over each other in 1 dashboard.
  • Data is a full truncate & reload, or you can use an API but it is an append only data flow.
  • In my opinion, it is SO expensive, therefore it provides horrible ROI.
  • When purchasing Tableau for an organization, you get no support unless you pay for it.
  • Once you pay for support, it is still an 8 hour window before someone will reach out to you. If your enterprise dashboard fails or you have an outage, you're just out a day.
We decided to use Tableau Desktop as that's fairly standard in the industry, it is being taught in college, and is widely known. Tableau Desktop is nice, but in my opinion, it is VERY expensive. Unless you are really making money off of decisions, then your ROI is going to be negligible. There are other tools like ThoughtSpot that are more supportive and cheaper to use across an organization.

Do you think Tableau Desktop delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with Tableau Desktop's feature set?

Yes

Did Tableau Desktop live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Tableau Desktop go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Tableau Desktop again?

No

Tableau is very good at what it does, however, what it is able to do is very limited. If you want a simple graph or a simple data table then you are set. If you want one of the beautiful intricate dashboards that you see on the web, then you will have to have nearly 50 sheets populating data or graphics that are then overlaid in a dashboard. This means there are so many points at which it can fail and is a nightmare to maintain.
Tableau does not give you support unless you pay for it. If your organization has purchased Tableau and not support, your best bet is to simply use Google for your issue. They were recently acquired by Salesforce so all of the community help forum posts are missing or hard to find now. Support is simply not something that you get, unless you pay for it.
Tableau Desktop is great if you use "Live Connections". Trying to use data sources is a nightmare. When consuming data for dashboards, it is either a full truncate & reload overnight which can take a long time depending on your data warehouse. Or you can use their Hyper & Rest APIs to automate grabbing new data, but it is append only. This means that if you have data that has changed, if you try to use these APIs you will then get duplicate primary keys in your data. So then you are forced to use the live connection or truncate & reload. So you can't source all of your data in 1 data source as that's too large, so then you are left with several small disparate data sources that you then have to support.

Tableau Desktop Feature Ratings

Pixel Perfect reports
8
Customizable dashboards
9
Report Formatting Templates
7
Drill-down analysis
7
Formatting capabilities
9
Integration with R or other statistical packages
9
Report sharing and collaboration
9
Publish to Web
9
Publish to PDF
8
Report Versioning
8
Report Delivery Scheduling
8
Delivery to Remote Servers
9
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
9
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
8
Predictive Analytics
9
Multi-User Support (named login)
8
Role-Based Security Model
10
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
10
Single Sign-On (SSO)
10
Responsive Design for Web Access
9
Mobile Application
9
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
9
REST API
1
Javascript API
2
iFrames
1
Java API
1
Themeable User Interface (UI)
Not Rated
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
Not Rated

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