Tableau Reviews

Visualization and user friendly. Visualization: How you sell your ideas or your message, for example, integrate D3.js graphs.

Traditionally bars or line graphs are useful, but they make a difference when presenting your important ideas. The vision of Business Intelligence creates a rupture between old-school (like IBM, Oracle, etc) and new guys (Tableau, TIBCO, and SAP Lumira) and new forms to work with: structured and unstructured data.

Interaction between information/data and final user.

Preparation and consolidation of data. Many organizations needs prepare data, changes formats or consolidate sources. ETL jobs waste a lot time and sometimes is unproductive.

Two years in my company.

No.

No.

An eight out of 10.

Excel.

Straightforward, because of the quality and consistency of data.

It's transparent; no hidden costs.

Yes, IBM Cognos, BusinessObjects, SAS, TIBCO, and Qlik.

Make your decision based on your own culture, quality of data, and champion for the project.

Data connectivity, data transformation, and web editing, because being able to connect to a variety of data sources and bring them together, and store that dataset in an environment where others can also access it, consistently, drives a lot of self-service within the organization without a lot of fear of dispersion of truth. The Web Editing capabilities allow us to grant end users enough capabilities for them to do self-serve discovery without the added cost of needing to get everyone desktop licenses.

Still working to get properly implemented at my current organization. However, it has helped my previous locations be able to get a pre-built visualization that anchors them on the truth, with access to datasets for them to explore and continuously push the envelope on new inquiries. The more questions we ask, and get answers to, the more informed we are to make better decisions, which leads to revenue growth and cost reductions.

At the organizational level, increasing the servers' capabilities to support us as an enterprise tool: data management, semantic layer, and integration with other collaboration tools. At the analyst level: Better connection with Python data frames.

I have used it since 2011.

No.

Yes. In earlier versions, it was tough to scale without a lot of expense. With the addition of Web Editing, you can control your costs better and keep your usage to the things they do the most frequently. Still experiencing challenges in the VM world, but sounds like they are exploring options to address this.

If you are fortunate enough to have a dedicated technical guy, it is great. If you have to work through the common help desk, it is tough. In most cases, analysts have problems they need to solve right away; having them spend hours pouring through KB files to only find something similar, but not exact, and then waiting 5-10 days to get resolution from a help desk agent generates a lot of frustration on the team.

Several companies ago, we were using Cognos and switched to Tableau due to ease of deployment, total cost of ownership. At my last three places, Tableau was already in-house.

Not applicable.

Really work across the organization to understand the user personas of your audience. Who is a builder, who is an audience member? Being able to set up the server licensing right (core vs user seats) is the fastest way to manage your costs. Paying for users you never setup or buying expensive desktop licenses for users who can solve their users with web editing on the server are the two biggest expenses.

Not applicable.

First and foremost, outline the value proposition of BI. Getting a plan on whether you are going to go with a centralized, decentralized, or blended approach will help aid you in how you can maximize the tool. On its own merits, it is a great tool. Most failures come from a mismatch in the organizational needs and the implementation approach.

• Rapid visualization of data
• Interactive views connecting multiple data sources
• Reduces need for IT cycles (hours vs. weeks to create report)
• Ability to analyze problems quickly
• Ability to share reports and analyses quickly

• Ability to focus staff on more analysis versus reporting
• More/Better/Faster analysis by staff

Pace of improvement to product has slowed. Most additions are now just nice to have.

More than eight years.

No.

No.

No.

I haven't really needed customer service. Help from the sales staff is okay at first. The community is amazing. You can google any question and usually find an answer.

I haven't really needed tech support.

Very straightforward. A lot of free training available online.

In-house. Easy!

• Spotfire
• MicroStrategy VI
• Qlik

Easily visualize data.

I'm able to prototype charts/dashboards in hours vs days or weeks with other tools (mainly Excel). Doesn't require me to think about the level of aggregation that I'm going to need as it deals with large data sets. Blends disparate datasets together which is awesome for plan vs actual reports where the data is a two different levels of granularity.

Needs a metadata solution plus some enhanced ETL functionality.

Edit: v9 introduced some light metadata solutions that are helpful from Excel.

4 years

None.

Initially used Tableau at a large electric utility where we were largely using Excel. Utility had bought into SAP BusinessObjects but IT had locked down these tools so much that all we had was Excel. Used to work at BOBJ myself but I haven't used their tools in while. We're going with Tableau right now because it works for our dept and we could get it working quickly and without an enormously long and expensive project to get IT involvement.

Now I work for a small start-up but one of the first things I did was to get a copy of Tableau. 

Very easy to build with a rudimentary understanding of databases and data.

So far we're just using the Tableau Desktop, so just the licenses for that. The Reader is free to deploy. We've just started to pilot Server.

Everyone is always impressed with the charts that Tableau can produce. As well as the ability quickly modify them.

• Ease of use
• Data visualization
• Predictive analytics and forecasting

We are a consulting company, so we could use it internally. However, this is more for other clients. It does help those clients in analyzing their data.

There are certain things that I would want it to do, but it wouldn't be something that I could easily describe.

I have been using this solution for around three years.

It all depends. You have to make sure that you've designed the data part well. It is doing better at handling scalability. In other words, you can throw more users at it and it shouldn't impact the system performance.

The setup part depends on what Tableau products you're using. For Tableau Desktop Developer, the setup was very straightforward.

Make sure that you have your requirements and your use cases. You need to know what exactly you are trying to solve. You need to know the story that you are trying to tell. The business needs to know.

If you are an IT organization, then you need to understand what the business is trying to do before you just go and start using the product.

Tableau was able to handle the challenges that we've had, in terms of reporting and analytics. It's flexible enough, so that you can bring in other data and be able to quickly marry that data with what you have, report on it, and be able to tell the story that the business wants fairly quickly.

Extraordinary ease of use, easier to use than any competitor product I’ve used in 15 years or so I’ve worked on MI/BI.

Since I originally wrote this, I have found the mapping on Tableau has been extremely useful and easy to use, particularly that it includes very good geocoding for the UK. In terms of the UK, the support and community here is also exceptional and I know that I don't have to trawl through sites endlessly to find solutions, the community is one of the strongest I've seen thus far in BI

Speed of data discovery and accelerated our ability to remodel our data and improve our existing ETL processes.

Expansion of number of visualisations, as well as potential for straight to dashboard function, rather than design individual visualisation – these are, however, genuinely not priority to amend.

Having used another software for a reasonable period of time, I wonder about the chances of incorporating other languages, such as d3.js in future releases (NB I'm still using 8.3)

~3 years

This was a Proof of Concept rather than full roll-out.

No, but important to note it was PoC.

No, but important to note it was PoC.

Excellent.

Exceptional, probably the best user community I’ve ever seen in nearly 15 years of working in MI/BI/Analytical roles.

Currently use an alternative provider, looking to switch to a newer more empowering piece of software, an alternative to Tableau was selected at a Global CIO level.

Extremely simple. Download a package, enter a key post purchase and that’s it. Very easy.

Vendor team – they had (and indeed have) significant knowledge of the product and continue to share best practice tips and knowledge through their e-publications.

Standard software license cost to setup initially and an optional maintenance fee which include version upgrades. On balance, the costs of software balance nicely against the user experience because you probably wouldn’t need to spend a great deal on training as the product is straightforward to use. I continue to use Tableau in my free/personal time but have been using Tibco Spotfire much more frequently in my professional capacity, so will look to update my review of that software as well

Evaluated numerous different BI tools, including but not restricted to Cognos, Jaspersoft, Pentaho, Tibco Spotfire.

Assess the scalability using the Server set up, engage users of the tool independently through the Tableau Community for their ideas and advice on the pro’s and con’s of the tool. Even the biggest evangelists will be honest enough to tell you where it doesn’t meet their expectations.

The most valuable feature of Tableau is the possibility to provide an overall view of the analysis done and let the users get the visualization the way they need/want.

Another valuable thing about using Tableau is that you just need to create the dashboard once. Any type of data update is done automatically.

It is also possible to combine many different types of data sources on a single data connection.

When I started using Tableau, one report that provided customer perception feedback involved a lot of manual effort, and every single month the historical number changed. Using an automatic way to analyze and provide the results increased accuracy to about 98% and reduced 99% of the rework.

There is still room to improve visualization when more than two dimensions are synchronized. Sometimes when you need to use more than one measurement from 2 different data sources, you won't be able to show the values.

Also it would be nice if it was possible to have more than one type of maks used on a single sheet, e.g. use trafic light together with text.

I have used it for about five years.

I did not really encounter any deployment, stability or scalability issues. There is a whole support team inside the company to solve these type of issues.

I did not really encounter any deployment, stability or scalability issues. There is a whole support team inside the company to solve these type of issues.

I did not really encounter any deployment, stability or scalability issues. There is a whole support team inside the company to solve these type of issues.

I did not really encounter any deployment, stability or scalability issues. There is a whole support team inside the company to solve these type of issues.

Every time I needed support directly from Tableu, their response took less than four hours to contact me back with an initial solution to my problem.

I get the first draft of our dashboards already done. Because it is a really friendly user tool, it didn't take too long for me to start developing my dashboards. Of course, after a while, I developed my skills and it became even easier.

I can say that it took about six months for Tableau to payback the investment done just by the fact that it reduced 99% of the rework for a single report.

If you are a student Tableau provides a 1 year license for desktop version. You can also publish your work on Tableau Public.

I strongly recommend using the trial version of Tableau before buy it. If you are not the type of person that is familiar with programming scripts, this is the perfect tool. It is really simple to create the first views, even though it will take a while to understand how some of the details work. Watching the tutorial videos helps too.

The data blending capabilities is a huge factor for our team. The ease of blending data from multiple sources has allowed us to generate new insight and bring a different level of questions to the meeting table. The type of dashboards we have been able to create have made it easier for individuals who are not use to looking at data to navigate and drill into their own material to find answers or ask questions they never thought to ask in the first place.

We’ve been able to replace several manual spreadsheet reports that took hours for individuals to complete. With Tableau Server and some automation processes put in place, those reports are now automatically delivered to the end users, saving time and money. We can also develop reports much faster than in the past plus provide an interface to a database which in the past might not of been used as much due to the lack of technical skills to write the queries.

Formatting controls could use some improvement. We’ve found that to be the most confusing part of developing reports, at least until you get use to where all the controls are at and how to use them. Ideally, making a user-friendly interface for formatting the worksheets and dashboards would be a big improvement and time saver. Recent version upgrades have added some new features such as being able to change the format for your entire workbook all at once. Still a work in progress though.

I have used it for eight years and sever administrator for 2 years.

Deployment and stability have been flawless so far. We’ve not encountered a data set that has slowed the software down and we use records with millions of rows. There is no clear-cut line of determining when best to consider switching over to an enterprise-wide model vs. per license, so there could be a better way of informing their customers on when to flip that switch.

We have never experienced an issue with the server software or any technical problems with the desktop or interactor licenses.

Once others in the company start seeing what it can do they immediately ask what needs to happen so they can get a license. We started down the path of looking at core enterprise licensing but were told the company is moving away from that model and sticking with a per user/license structure. Depending on how many in the company want to start using the software plus needing the additional interactor license to access the server the purchases can add up quickly.

Very little need to contact their customer service but when I did they were professional and quick to respond.

Both customer service and technical support have been excellent. Sales reps have been very nice to work with and you don’t end up with that used car salesmen feel. In fact, we typically meet with our reps about 3-4 times a year and have been extremely supportive.

No - most of our reporting was done between MS Excel and MS Access.

Setup was extremely easy. Essentially a plug-and-play right out of the box.

We implemented it in-house. Implementation was easy in comparison to other systems we’ve worked on in the past. QA testing was seamless and found no integration issues.

We’ve found quite a bit of savings using Tableau, based on the time it takes to develop ad-hoc reports, changes in process due to new insights and report automation.

Best advice on pricing is to anticipate the desire for more licenses once the results of this product are acknowledged in other parts of your company. Note that for others to interface with a published report on your server, they need what’s called an interactor license. We acquired several guest interactor licenses in order to lend out to departments so they can see the benefit of accessing their reports on the server vs. static reports. This encourages them to purchase their own interactor licenses or at least plan to purchase when preparing their budgets for the following year.

We evaluated several potential software systems such as Visier, Lumira, and Qlik, but found Tableau the easiest to use for individuals who did not need to have a programming background. Plus, the freedom to develop from a blank canvas with data that could be from any corner of the company appealed more to our team than working with a set of canned metrics to one specific department.

The annual Tableau customer conference is a huge learning opportunity for new and seasoned users alike. The week-long conference provides a large number of workshops to help increase your skills and many of these sessions are hands-on training. Also a great way to network with other users and see how they are using Tableau.