Tableau Public is a great community-driven dashboard program
January 02, 2019
Tableau Public is a great community-driven dashboard program
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Tableau Public
Tableau Public was used during the initial onboarding stages of the Tableau platform (when we were making decisions about what dashboard program to implement organization-wide). It was used across the entire organization in different capacities: as an analyst, I primarily worked on requirements gathering for dashboards from clients and internal teams, and then built the dashboards to the gathered specifications. Data engineers built APIs and data pipelines to provide the requisite data to test the platform. Clients and internal team members used Tableau Public to view and present different reports based on the data from different platforms. Tableau Public, like Tableau (corporate or enterprise), is a dashboard program meant to work with large datasets and visualize and present that data in digestible formats. In this sense, it addresses the issues of understanding the story data tells: its viz capabilities are great for summarizing data (say, monthly spending performance), and identifying trends using different visualizations.
- Data visualization: lots of different options, including bar, scatter, pie, waterfall charts to explore relationships between variables, and to present findings/trends to different teams
- Integrates readily with limited, though different data sources: TXT, CSV, TDE, Access
- Exports reports for review of different dashboards: client-ready/team-ready, with a clean and tidy presentation in PDF format (or hardcopy)
- The biggest drawback to the Public version of Tableau is that any data used in the program is 'public' and therefore not secure: workbooks are saved to the cloud, rather than locally
- Tableau Public limits data ingestion to 10 million rows per source
- Limited connections - can't connect to SQL databases to ingest data (must be through CSV, Access, TDE, or text files)
Tableau Public is most similar to Google Data Studio in terms of being freely available for public use. However, its capabilities and sophisticated visualizations are far and beyond anything offered by Data Studio: Tableau is ideal for creating professional caliber workbooks and reports that combine visualizations, tables, and summary data - tailored with the color schemes and layout appropriate to the project or organization. In terms of basic functionality, Tableau Public is most similar to other BI / Viz programs like QlikView or Power BI, but remains the industry standard compared ot other options. I selected Tableau Public to get a feel for Tableau's capabilities against other competitors, and for professional reporting, analysis, and viz, there's nothing comparable on the market to Tableau's capabilities: even with the truncated ingestion options in the Public version, it still outshines Qlik, Power BI, and Datastudio -- especially because it's freely available.