Tableau Reviews

Tableau is an analytics tool so we use it to feed the data. I get the raw data. We use it for business problems. If I want to see what is happening in the market I have Tableau's raw data. I'll make sure that I take all that data and feed it into Tableau.

It's very user-friendly. It's not like Power BI, Tableau is very user-friendly. Anybody can use Tableau. It's very easy to adopt things. I can visualize the stats.

It's one of the fastest-growing data visualization and data analytics tools. It aims to help people see the data. You can simplify and convert raw data into a very understandable format. That's the good thing about Tableau. 

I've been using Tableau for two years. 

The stability is good. It's easy to use. It's user-friendly. 

Scalability is quite flexible. It designed to give a more flexible scaling experience. It's quite easy to add users. The Tableau server can support 200 users.

I get good support from the Tableau team. If I have any issues, they're able to solve my issue within 24 to 48 hours. If I create an issue, they resolve it between 24 to 48 hours. If I have an issue, I'll just send in a form in the Tableau portal. 

The initial setup was easy. My IT team took care of setting up the licensing part. 

The pricing is expensive. 

We also evaluated Power BI and Qlikview. I'm more comfortable with Tableau, it's user-friendly.

I would rate Tableau a nine out of ten. 

It's a good thing that I'm able to visualize my raw data. In the next release, I would like to be able to have the option to see more raw data that I'm converting on the dashboard.

I use this solution for healthcare analytics.

Tableau has provided visibility into patterns which I had not previously observed.

The ease of developing visualizations, not just charts and graphs.

• The enterprise features need improvements.
• Improvements in schema security and row/column security need to be made.

Business Intelligence for operational and executive dashboards. It is used to create real-time operational insights which start at the line-level staff person who manages their own productivity and performance indicators. This gets rolled up to middle and upper management and provides a full sense of operations and targeted goal achievement.

Excellent product: Great visualizers and it is easy to use. 

Allows insights into business performance issues, providing supporting data for critical policy and operational changes.

It is easy to adapt visualizers to have interactive conversations among decision-makers. Powerful aggregating and drill-downs are critical for effective insight discovery.

Deployment of dashboards to viewers and unit supervisors can be prohibitively expensive.

The cost is high.

• Ease of use
• Efficiency
• Integration with sources
• Amazing way to view your data

Data visualization and analysis used to take much longer; we were able to shorten the delivery of the projects by 60%.

I would like to see improvement in licensing. It is expensive to provide licenses beyond the 10 we already have.

I have been using it for four years.

Our deployment issues are related to cost.

No, very stable product

Yes. licensing costs are an issue

Technical support is 9/10.

We didn’t have a data vis solution beyond Excel and MSRS before. I used Spotfire in my business school work.

Initial setup was straightforward. I created a data mart, plugged in Tableau and started creating dashboards.

A vendor team implemented it. Implementation was pretty straightforward – but our data was cleaned and well thought through. I would say, 80% of time should be spent on designing your data mart (if that’s the route you are taking) with clean data and valid data sources.

We haven’t calculated ROI, but we know that we shortened the delivery timeline by 60%.

Make sure you plan it into the 5 year plan - how many licenses you will need, etc.

When time came to select a tool for my work, I did thorough research. I downloaded trial versions of both products and selected Tableau based on my user experience and the ratings (Gartner quadrant).

Beware of licensing costs, but it shouldn’t deter anyone from using this product. Even if you just use Tableau desktop to provide static data vis’s, it’s worth it.

The most valuable features are the ability to use various data sets from different platforms, the intuitive graphs, and the ability to play around with the data and graph selections for different views of the data. As the course work is focused on ‘Big Data’ - both structured and unstructured - the ability to mix some of these sets and have Tableau suggest the best graph was very helpful. Because the product is so flexible, other graphs can be selected and a new ‘view’ of the same data presents a different insight.

All product use was through the school.

Version-specific work did not automatically version up with the upgrade. Since the version change occurred during the course and the majority of us had never used Tableau before, this static versioning for the projects caused some anxiety and some rework. There might have been an easier way to move these projects to the new version, but it was not transparent how to do that and online resources referenced an older version solution that did not work in the newer version.

I was introduced to the product through a few courses in my master’s program in Business Analytics, and was able to use Tableau Desktop for one of the course projects.

I did not encounter any deployment, stability or scalability issues. All product was through the school.

I did not interact with Tableau staff; all support was derived from the school’s IT staff.

The initial desktop setup was phenomenally easy and straightforward. Access to test projects and videos are available to ensure that the product works as expected.

Desktop implementation is user-based and although the setup is easy, it is necessary to be cognizant of where the base files reside and how projects and data sets are stored.

I am unable to provide pricing/licensing advice; the licensing is provided through the school with keys for each student to obtain a desktop version.

Tableau is a very robust engine. As attractive as the speed to combine data sets is and the great visuals it can produce, it is well known that it is not an affordable product if you maintain small datasets. To use a phrase, you don’t need an army tank where a red wagon will do. Because of this, Tableau would need to have a Tableau-lite for smaller businesses, so that it wasn’t so hard to start using the tool, then as the business grows, so does the product if need be.

The most valuable features of Tableau are:

• The ease of learning and use. Tableau is very user friendly. I have a few colleagues at my place of work that had never used it. Within a few months, they created brilliant content.
• The ability to connect to any data source without any reporting layer or meta-data layer needing to be developed. I can connect directly to Oracle tables & views, SQL Server objects, flat files, Excel files, anything. I don’t need to do any additional work in order to achieve this.
• The capability of creating brilliant, creative insights while still achieving data discovery. Tableau makes creating analysis fun and beautiful, while still finding incredible gold nuggets in the dark data of enterprises.
• The culture and support community around the product. There is a true excitement in the Tableau community and anyone who uses Tableau knows what I'm talking about. There are many user group community meetings around the globe that are educational, helpful and fun.
• The ability to share, collaborate and view content through Tableau Server or Tableau Public. It is easy to send users to a web portal to see content analysts create.
• The cost. Tableau is much lower priced than an Oracle-, SAP-, MicroStrategy-type product. The cost is similar to QlikView and a bit more than Microsoft PowerBI on its own (but you need an EA from Microsoft to leverage the lower pricing on PowerBI).
• The support. I can pick up my cell phone and call four people I know from Tableau and get their feedback and help right now.

We now are starting to remove the data silos. We are seeing how data visualization helps to lead to quicker actionable insight. It also has helped reduce the number of reports and dashboards the organization needs.

I am very excited about Tableau 10 and what has been built into the beta. I think with those changes and some we saw at TC15 that are coming, the product is poised to remain the industry leader.

I would like to see Tableau provide a bit better integration with the Microsoft Office platform. You can download your dashboard data to CSV or crosstab, but it’s not optimal. Even if it’s the best dashboard design ever, there are users that still want to see the numbers underneath. Until data visualization reaches a critical mass, like Excel did in the late 90s to early 2000s, we still will need a way to give access to some of the underlying data in an easy way for Microsoft Office to consume.

I have used it for 3 1/2 years.

I have not encountered any issues. Deployment, stability and scalability have been fantastic. We've had a few bugs, two of which were fixed by Tableau support and one took a bit longer and was fixed in a release. However, we've not had long-term outages due to any issues. Installing Tableau is easy. Upgrading the server could be easier, but I think they have addressed that with version 10.

Customer service and support at Tableau is top notch. I haven't seen a better organization in technology with this.

I have used Oracle OBIEE before and Tableau beats that product on cost, usability and ease/speed of development. I don't have to know how to develop the RPD or meta-data layer. Tableau does that behind the scenes when I import a data source. Tableau was also much cheaper than OBIEE.

We also own PowerBI and Tableau is significantly better at ease of use and the number of data sources.

Initial setup was straightforward. We had a rapid start-up "team" come and help us but it was one person and he was done in two days.

Tableau sent out one of their partners, Interworks. I would highly recommend Interworks to help with Implementation. They can make the most of the implementation with their Drive methodology.

Our first dashboard caught an issue in the system and almost completely paid for the server license with the money saved.

Negotiate the server license. The desktop license price is pretty set.

Find a couple of good, quick-win use cases and don't necessarily re-create the dashboard or report in Tableau, but find a way to tell something about the business that wasn't already known.

Data Preparation - This is a huge plus for Tableau as so many users have to spend time preparing the data before using Tableau

• Data Interpreter
• Splits -
• Really helps the average user

Drag and drop analytics:

Tableau 9.0 has a new Analytics pane that provides quick and easy access to common analytic features in Tableau.

You can drag reference lines, forecasts, trend lines, and other objects into your view from the Analytics panel. It is now easy to edit, format, and remove the analytic items that you have added, so you can experiment with different techniques as you explore the insights your data has to offer.

Ad--‐hoc calculations:

Ad--‐hoc calculations make it easy to add and edit calculated fields for your analysis. Double--‐click an existing field on the Rows, Columns, Marks, or Measure Values shelf to begin editing, or

double-click an empty area on a shelf to create a new calculation. As you type, a list of auto--‐complete options appears in a dropdown list, making it easier to find and pick the right elements.

Instant analytics:

Instant analytics provides an interactive experience for comparing summary information about a subset of marks to all the marks in your view. For example, you can compare the average for a few marks to the average for all the marks. After you’ve added trend lines, reference lines, reference bands, or distribution bands to your view, select one or more marks to see the new analytical indicators appear for the selection in addition to the analytical indicators for the whole view.

Level of Detail (LOD) Expressions:

New expression syntax in the Tableau calculation language lets you quickly create calculated fields that compute at the specified levels of detail. LOD calculations help you compute at multiple levels of aggregation and make it easier to create fields for analytical comparison (such as cohort analysis and totals or Average across segments), simplifying calculations that previously took several steps.

It's both intuitive and complex/deep. For our organization, it's given us opportunities to provide both on-sight and on-line training. We now have an online training product that more than offsets the expense associated with days of training. With Tableau, our customers more analytical.

It even has a connection to R and SAS for advanced users.

Also, it has given us the ability to collaborate with the Tableau servers, which is robust and can handle tens of thousands of users.

Tableau Server can now scale for unlimited users Enterprise scale brings with it the need for Governance. Data sources and workbooks must be vetted before they are "out there" to see except for the intended content consumers

The basic design of Tableau has some features that could be modified.

* There is no need to have five (5) ways to add a new worksheet. Brevity is rewarded - new users have so much to learn that 2 ways would do the job

* How to render time - When performing analysis, no single issue is more important than time series data. Tableau uses visual clues in many places - When one uses the pull down option for time that could be visualized better as a continuum. those selections should be presented in green to be visually consistent. Those above in blue.

If you're making a structured, strategic purchase, make sure that you have a plan for professional training.

• Go slow and methodically
• You must consider size of the company and types of users
• Desktop Plus server users - understand the constraints on the backend, and make sure you have enough CPU power
• There's lots of free stuff on their website that's great for the average user.

It is mainly used for reporting and dashboarding purposes.

We implement it for our customers. We have different customers. For some, it is on the cloud, and for some, it is on-premises. Our customers have been using Google Cloud. 

In terms of its version, we are probably using the latest minus one version.

The visualizations are quite rich. It has charts and other visualizations. 

Its performance is pretty good, and the development time is very low.

Its integration with Microsoft products such as Teams should be improved.

I have been using this solution for three years.

It is quite stable.

Its scalability is quite good. The negative side would be the cost, but it is quite scalable.

For the projects we have worked on, one of the projects had about a thousand users, and one of the projects had about 200 users. I handle a development team here, and my team is not very big. It is just a four-member team.

It is used by the management, CXOs, and even the mid-level management people. It's basically for decision-making, so mainly the executive board uses these dashboards.

We have not interacted with them. Our clients deal with that part. We don't do that.

It is not very complicated. Deployment hardly takes a day or two.

We do it on our own. We are a consulting company.

Its cost is quite high. A corporate license costs about 150-200K per year for all the users, but there was probably some discounted amount. This cost includes everything.

A practical piece of advice would be that if you really have a requirement to use Tableau as a tool, you can go for it. Otherwise, there are some open-source and low-cost tools. For example, Amazon QuickSight is a relatively new tool by Amazon, and it is a very good one. It is a very good competitor for Tableau. Apache Superset is another one that has recently been gaining lots of traction. So, it depends on your budget. If you want to have low costing, you can go for these low-cost and good alternatives.

Tableau is quite a mature tool. I would rate it an eight out of 10.