Tableau Desktop is a great tool for quick and efficient data visualization
February 26, 2025

Tableau Desktop is a great tool for quick and efficient data visualization

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Tableau Desktop

I use it to create Business reporting on top of (mainly) Snowflake tables. The reports are showcasing the both the content on our side and also user behaviour in the form of graphs & tables. Stakeholders are on the business side but also in the product end of things. Tha main calculations & aggregations are usually done in DBT to avoid too large data extracts in Tableau Desktop but some simple(ish) calculations are also done in Tableau Desktop.

Pros

  • It is quick to load readily aggregated data.
  • Building a basic visualisation with color coding and filtering is easy.
  • Sharing insights to right stakeholders is nice through the server.

Cons

  • When to use dimension, attribute etc. is not always clear and it is a bit of trial and error.
  • It would be nice to be able to modify a filter so that it wouldn't be directly single select or multi-select. As an example, it would be nice to allow readily aggregated value "All" to be select as a single select, but other values could be multi-select.
  • The "allow labels to overlap other marks" is not always functioning IMO.
  • Tableau Desktop helps team follow their KPIs in a standardised manner every week.
  • Tableau Desktop visualisations are good in recognising anomalies in the data.
  • Sometimes the anomalies are shown despite their small impact which can lead to priorities getting shifted too often. This of course comes from the efficient drill down / filtering abilities and sometimes leave the users without the big picture understanding.
I think it is easy to start using it. It has a big variety of sources to connect to and making simple visualisations is good. There are a lot of (even free) trainings to be taken from the provider which make developing the skills quite easy. It allows flexibility for more complex visualisation & calculation purposes too and somewhat follows regular "coding languages".

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

Yes

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?

Yes

When ever the aggregations/measures are already done with DBT / Databricks or similar in advance, Tableau Desktop will be very efficient in showing the figures and giving some filtering options. If the datasource is massive and a lot of aggregated calculations would be needed combined with a lot of filtering hopes and dreams, Tableau Desktop can get really slow and heavy to use.

Tableau Desktop Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
Not Rated
Pixel Perfect reports
Not Rated
Customizable dashboards
Not Rated
Report Formatting Templates
Not Rated
9.0
Drill-down analysis
10
Formatting capabilities
8
Integration with R or other statistical packages
Not Rated
Report sharing and collaboration
9
9.0
Publish to Web
9
Publish to PDF
Not Rated
Report Versioning
Not Rated
Report Delivery Scheduling
Not Rated
Delivery to Remote Servers
Not Rated
8.5
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
10
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
7
Predictive Analytics
Not Rated
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining
Not Rated
8.7
Multi-User Support (named login)
Not Rated
Role-Based Security Model
8
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
9
Report-Level Access Control
9
Single Sign-On (SSO)
Not Rated
10.0
Responsive Design for Web Access
10
Mobile Application
Not Rated
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
Not Rated
Not Rated
REST API
Not Rated
Javascript API
Not Rated
iFrames
Not Rated
Java API
Not Rated
Themeable User Interface (UI)
Not Rated
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
Not Rated

Using Tableau Desktop

100 - Most of the people in my organisation using Tableau Desktop are analysts of some sort. On top of that people who work as business controllers or domain experts have some dashboards of their own that they are also publishing. Analysts include both product and business analyst who make reports for multiple stakeholders.
1 - I am not so familiar with this topic, especially when it comes to Tableau Desktop - I think our support usually answers to the Server questions. However, the person must have a basic understanding on our underlying data sources, what kind of licensing we obtain while keeping an eye on the server capabilities.
  • Efficient visualisations to support business intiatives
  • Translating raw data into understandable metrics
  • Bringing insights available to the public
  • We showcased qualitative survey results
  • Some word cloud visualisations have been exiting
  • Data predictions
  • Scenario analyses
It of course comes as a given from my organisation, but I like it as a visualisation tool. It works well with our tech solutions like Snowflake and allows efficient data analysis while visualising the figures in a nice way. Also the filtering is a bonus and allows different stakeholders to use the same reports for their benefit.

Evaluating Tableau Desktop and Competitors

Not Sure
  • Other
I have not been involved in the purchase of Tableau Desktop, it was the selected tool when I joined.
As stated, I wasn't involved in the previous round.

Tableau Desktop Implementation

Tableau Desktop Training

  • Online Training
I think the training was good overall, but it was maybe stating the obvious things that a tech savvy young engineer would be able to pick up themselves too. However, the example work books were good and Tableau web community has helped me with many problems.

Configuring Tableau Desktop

I don't know if I understand the question unfortunately. I don't know if I have ever done any configuring regarding Tableau desktop, which might already answer the question...
I don't know what it means so no.

Tableau Desktop Support

I have never contacted support. The title tells me to skip but that doesn't seem to be possible, thus gave a 1 which will unfortunately skew the results.
ProsCons
None
None
I have never contacted support. The title told me to skip the first question but that doesn't seem to be possible, thus gave a 1 which will unfortunately skew the results.

Using Tableau Desktop

ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • YoY calculations
  • % change
  • LOD calculations
Yes, but I don't use it

Tableau Desktop Reliability

I think there is no scalability issues. The functions serve so many and custom calculations can be added nicely. The data source list is very extensive with ready made connectors so no complaints.
I think Tableau has always been available, that is not an issue. Sometimes the performance seems to run out quite fast if the data is larger.
Most times it work nicely, but I have a couple of reports were the amount of data is really not that big but still Tableau is having a hard time with them. The datasource includes relationships between multiple tables so maybe that is causing issues.

Upgrading Tableau Desktop

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