Tableau Server is an absolute must for getting the most out of the Tableau Platform.
January 28, 2019
Tableau Server is an absolute must for getting the most out of the Tableau Platform.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Tableau Server
Tableau Server is used in my company as our primary method for sharing business insights. We build visualization dashboards in Tableau Desktop, then publish them to project folders in Tableau Server so that the appropriate teams can access their near real-time metrics.
- It's good at doing what it is designed for: accessing visualizations without having to download and open a workbook in Tableau Desktop. The latter would be a very inefficient method for sharing our metrics, so I am glad that we have Tableau Server to serve this function.
- Publishing to Tableau Server is quick and easy. Just a few clicks from Tableau Desktop and a few seconds of publishing through an average speed network, and the new visualizations are live!
- Seeing details on who has viewed the visualization and when. This is something particularly useful to me for trying to drive adoption of some new pages, so I really appreciate the granularity provided in Tableau Server
- I think the UI of how projects and folders within projects are managed could use some improvement. The organization is pretty straightforward, but it's designed for a large amount of content. Accessing a simple dashboard from one published workbook requires clicking into a Project then clicking into the dashboard to actually see the content. It's hard to describe without seeing it, but it always feels like there was an extra, unnecessary click. Seems minor, but this is an annoyance I and my colleagues face many times through the day.
- There seems to be some formatting issues between what's built in Tableau Desktop (TD) and Tableau Server (TS), e.g., if I format some filters over a background in TD, they show up very legibly with the background as white against the color background. But when published the same filters could have the color of the background and no way to change it to white, and the font has less contrast for some reason. Seems minor, but it wastes a lot of time retrying then re-publishing just to get something to work as expected. The view in TD should be exactly the same as TS.
- As far as I can tell, there's no way to put a clone of a certain dashboard into multiple projects/folders and have any updates propagate to those clones. Also as far as I can tell, there's no feature that tracks where the same dashboard has been published in multiple places. That means if I have a dashboard that I need to show in multiple places so those teams can access it in their native location with their other content contextual to them, I have to maintain a record of all the places I've published and re-publish to all whenever updates are made. And if it turns out the solution is there in the product, then the UI is clearly pretty dense because I haven't found it whereas this was an intuitive setting to find on a competitor BI tool I have used. I think this should be improved in the product since it's often necessary to manage the same content across multiple locations so various teams are accessing their single location relevant to them.
- Positive impact is lower cost on our org. We had a previous tool that had very high cost for view-only users, so high that we couldn't provide broad enough access to our organization and had to restrict who could use the tool. We wanted to share all this information more broadly, so the much lower view-only user cost of using Tableau Server was a big benefit to us.
- Negative impact for me as a designer of visualizations is that I have to have an installed software on my PC (Tableau Desktop) to do major editing of any content used for Tableau Server. Yes, you can do minor editing in Server, but Desktop is required for the heavy lifting.
- Another negative impact is the responsiveness of the system. Tableau Server often takes much longer to load a view than our previous tool. Example is selecting a filter and having to wait more than what feels "typical" for a page with information, over and over while using the tool. It seems too dense to load promptly. I know there are design decisions that can reduce the load time, but even while using those practices the result still feels slow.