Tableau Reviews

I knew this service from my academic field and was able to transfer it to the workplace. It is an excellent tool for data capture, processing, and visualization. The application of statistical models on the data displayed is very useful, and it is not complicated.

Tasks which may have involved days, even weeks, I was able to solve them in a very short period of time, thanks to Tableau. 

Information which was housed in a database, used for exploring, ordering and applying statistical models for analysis can be complex when involving different software. However, it was easy to do using Tableau exclusively.

What hooked me to this service is the combination of very pleasant, interactive graphical visualizations along with the application of advanced statistical models (in some cases).

The use of this service in the desktop version is annoying due to the constant updates which lead to reinstalling the application. If they could give support with updates on the same downloaded version, it would be great.

I like the payment model. For the people who need to create, they buy their licenses. Everyone else can use the free Tableau Viewer. This is much better than some of the competitor products, which require full licences for everything.

I have trialed a number of different tools similar to Tableau. There seems to be a whole group of them. However, I found that Tableau was by far the easiest to use. Within about 20 minutes of playing around I was able to quickly make fantastic looking, incredibly useful charts that I struggled to make in Excel or other data discovery tools.

I have only trialed it. I could not get this product signed off due to budget constraints, not related to Tableau (which is far from the most expensive out there). 

Recommendations to others considering the product: Trial it and play around with it. You will be amazed at how quickly you pick it up. 

Sales dashboards for management, which were implemented initially in v.10.2, then upgraded systematically with new releases to v.10.5.

The solution is being delivered to our customer, who appreciates the insights generated from the reports. It is easy for them to drill into the details and use interactive charts. This provides a great value-added once stepped out from the Excel tables era. 

Definitely ease of use and interactivity. We found Tableau has the quickest learning time out of the few other BI reporting tools that we have used. 

We would much appreciate an option for copying/moving objects between different pages and a possibility for teamwork when working on the same dashboards.

We use it for different groups within the bank. They produce the visualizations they need based on their requirements. It's just rolling out. It's mostly for reports or visualizations - different financial applications. There are also HR applications as well.

For the groups that are advanced, they are pretty happy with the results, and the ones that are just starting the process, the journey, our group is ready to help. There are a lot of learning materials out there to get them trained and try different things out.

In the long run, things should be faster to deployment, to production, than they used to be before.

It's the speed of getting results, based on what the user actually requires. Before it was a very strict, follow the FDLC process. There was a lot of documenting and control that you had to follow before it went to production. We have decreased those a little bit so that they can move to production a lot more quickly than they used to. So time to market, or time to production is a lot faster than it used to be, because of self-service.

It's the ease of use, the quick deployment from developing it and then moving it on to our servers. It's much faster than our Cognos deployment.

It is also a self-service tool so it decreases the burden on having centralized IT-type teams or developers. It has now gone out to the different groups within the bank, and we just have to make sure that they follow certain governance rules so that they don't create crazy queries. It's easier for them. Hopefully, in the long run, they will get their visualization much more quickly. They are closer to the team members that are giving the requirements so they get feedback right away.

I think they have just come out with a tool called Prep, which we just heard about today. It was something that was missing, a little data preparation type of tool. I believe it is an ETL tool but it's not, as far as I know, a robust type tool.

The other thing is a data modeling tool, a little bit more advanced modeling. I would like to see functionality like Cognos has in the Framework Manager.

We are somewhat new at it, so as more and more people onboard to the server, we'll see how that is being managed. Of course, if the performance is slow, we have to find out the reasons, the causes. If it has to do with how they are building certain things, we have to send that information back to them and then they have to correct their models.

We are in the early stages right now. I wouldn't consider ourselves in the middle or advanced stage yet. We're onboarding a number of customers now to our servers.

This is one of the things that we're going to have to address as people start onboarding. It's going to be the challenge, where we have to choose which BI tool to use. Thre is scalability in term of the number of users and in terms of the volume of data. We don't know the volumes of data that we're dealing with. If they're extracting data and putting it onto our server, that all will take up space. Those are things that we're going to discover over time.

Tableau is also improving its product. We're not using the latest version which has some performance improvements. That's because we don't have the hardware to support it. That is something that Tableau will, I'm sure, improve over time as well and catch up with some of the bigger players.

I haven't personally used support but when there is an issue, an internal ticket gets placed and if we can't resolve it ourselves, then we have a platform team. There is a member there who will submit it to Tableau. There have been a few of those.

The switch was driven by the end-user level. We discovered that people were actually getting the self-service tool without us really being aware of it. Once we found out that they were using it, we did some research and looked at the market, saw how popular this tool is and how easy it is to use compared to our existing tool. We said, "Okay, let's not fight the end-users. Let's help the end-users, let's adopt it and help them grow." 

That is how we've moved to this level where we've actually built out of a center practice. We're now a group, not so much of developers, but of people that will help the individual businesses build their own projects.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are support, for sure, and their ability to advance in the technology. We have found with Tableau that there is such a community out there. They have a lot of information that is freely available. Those are the main things, support and that they advance their products, that they don't get stale.

I wasn't the one that did the server setup. Definitely, on the desktop, it's very easy to use. And I suspect that the server is also fairly easy. It's pretty straightforward in terms of deploying projects onto the server and promoting it on to production. I haven't heard of any real hiccups yet.

In our case, people were already using Tableau. There are other groups within our company that are using other types of tools like MicroStrategy, and we already had BusinessObjects and Cognos here. But because of the ease of use and the self-service nature of the product we decided, for products in that category, that Tableau was the best.

My advice would be that you should consider Tableau. Certainly, for visualization-type projects, it would definitely be one of the products to look at, and I would recommend it at this time.

Because we are just starting the process, I would definitely give it an eight out of 10. We are getting a lot of good support from the groups using it, but that can only get better as we get more and more groups adopting it, and they are happy. It's really going to be a matter of how happy our users are in building their projects. As that grows, and if their feedback is good, then that will only increase the product's rating.

Tablo has a good community base and we're trying to recreate that community within the bank as well so that different groups of individuals can help each other. That's what we're promoting, and it's working. We have our own intranet site that people can go onto and ask questions and get answers. We also have training and all sorts of different information that's Tableau related.

• Create dashboards for different functions in the organization.
• Used to report out information from the corporate data repository.

It provides business users with a tool, so they are not dependent on IT.

• Visual analytical reporting
• Ad hoc reporting
• Self-service; users can build their own reports based on their needs.
• Drag and drop to create analytical dashboards.
• Multiple data sources connectors

Needs bursting email and export to Excel. Many users still need to download the information (to Excel) and export to an Excel macro to merge the info with some other info. 

Bursting email is also needed to deliver the reports to many people in their inboxes and this functionality is not provided by Tableau.

Analysis is now more visual than in the past, which was only long operational support reports with bunches of info.

As a BI system integrator. we design performance solutions for different industries. We do use different tools in our solutions, and Tableau software is one of the our partners. One of the solutions we developed for a telecom client was a performance management tool. The solution used reporting dashboards based on network performance KPIs.

Using Tableau, it has made the reporting stage simple and enabled us to focus mainly on the ETL part.

The most important feature is the tool is very easy to use. This makes it simple to introduce it to CxOs. After a rapid demo, they are usual impressed by the results shown, because it has such a rare simplicity. 

• Needs more ETL capabilities, to be able to address the end-to-end BI need. 
• The ability to use it on MAC machines. As far as I know, this is not possible.

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.

I use Tableau Desktop and Server 10.4 for data visualization to measure business targets and performance, it helps the business identify strategies and solutions to meet objectives.

Our clients are so happy with the new visualisation tools. It has answered most of their questions on how to measure and improve their business performance. 

It gives us a new dimension to the way that we analyse our data.

• Parameters
• Calculations
• Dynamic filters
• LOD
• The ability to use multiple data sources. 

The use of a storyboard helps the flow of the data visualisation.

If they could add global filters in the stories, more chart types, and default colours, it would help.    

As a consultant and solutions developer for an integrator company, I use Tableau for the construction of Control Dashboards and BI applications.  

• Enhanced application development
• Less time spent with end users
• Better interaction with end users
• Better application quality

• Easy of use
• Easy to learn
• Gradual scalability from simple to complex situations
• Wide integration with BI industry

Provide additional enhancements in any business process: Operations, Marketing and Sales, Finance, Human Resources, Logistics, etc.