Tableau Reviews

Tableau Desktop is equipped with so many valuable features that it is difficult to know where to begin. The functionality that allows users to join multiple source files and create visualizations using the fields from each of the joined source files is certainly nice to have. While the list of graphs and charts on the “Show Me” menu is impressive, one can do so much more with Tableau. With a little imagination and ingenuity, customized visualizations can be created easily and quickly.

It is far easier for my audience to grasp the key takeaways of an analysis by viewing a data visualization than by reviewing a spreadsheet. Tableau Desktop simplifies communication between analytics and senior executives.

I have not yet transitioned to Tableau Desktop 10.0, but I understand version 10.0 has functionality that allow users to perform cluster analysis. I am sure that I will be using this functionality frequently going forward.

I was introduced to Tableau as part of an online course on data visualization offered by the University of California, Irvine. Although I have been using Tableau for less than a year, I use the product frequently.

I have not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues.

Tableau provides an enormous number of online resources that are clear, concise, and very thorough. You are almost guaranteed to find the answers you are seeking within this online documentation.

We did evaluate a number of other BI solutions before selecting Tableau Desktop. In the end, we chose Tableau Desktop because of its flexibility and superior graphics. We are a fairly small organization. While we do not currently have a data warehouse, we are planning to build a BIDW within the next three years. Once the data warehouse has been rolled out, we will transition from Tableau Desktop to Tableau Server. In the era of big data, Tableau Server offers a number of attractive features including the built-in interface with both the R Project and various open source big data applications.

The initial setup for Tableau Desktop is about as straightforward as possible. Once you download the software to your computer, you are ready to use the application.

• Analytics
• Dashboarding
• Presentation
• Reporting

• Transitioned from static to dynamic reporting
• Transitioned from restricted to flexible visualizations

• Scheduling the reports as email to multiple users on daily basis preferably in Excel without creating user accounts for each user
  Establishing an effective connection from SAP BO universe to Tableau

I have used it for 3+ years.

I have not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues. I recommend filtering data at the source itself instead of bringing data into the tool and then applying filters.

Technical support is excellent. I hope they continue doing the same.

We previously used another solution. We switched to Tableau because, in my opinion, it has some of the best features available. It will take five years for other tools to catch up to where Tableau is right now.

Initial setup complexity was due to the organization's data structure, but it had nothing to do with the tool.

Implementation was in-house; we read through the guide.

It is expensive but worth it. I would prefer a lower license cost or an increase in the allowed # of users per license.

Buy it, implement it and stick with it for a sure and quick ROI.

Easy visualization, with only drag & drop, double-click!

Yesterday: Excel -> pivot table -> graph ....think...think...think and re-work because of no insight.

Today: Double-click or drag & drop and see....see...find insight.

• Korean geographic map at the detail level
• Polygon map is a hot requirement from end users

Korean users want the Tableau default map function to be one more detailed level
when they would visualize Korean territories.
----------------
Country : South Korea
Great area(OOO-do) : Seoul city, Busan city, KyungKi-do, Chungchung-do,...
County(XXX-gu): Mapo-gu, Seocho-gu,.Gangnam-gu these are covered by Tableau 10.

It needs more detailed level (GGG-dong) that is Seocho-dong, Minrak-dong, Woomyun-dong as these are not covered yet.

I have been using Tableau for six months.

DB speed, but it's a complicated issue that could be caused by Oracle? Excel? Tableau? N/W? etc...

I rate the level of customer service and technical support 9/10.

Initial setup was easy: Download the software and drag an DB file(i.e. excel) onto the Tableau icon.

That's it. There is no easier way to get started.

End users should "study" the software.
Do not wait for the IT department any longer.
Do it yourself.

Return = time saving, efficiency.
Investment = license fee & study time.

When you consider how much time is wasted on DB work, including visualization, the license fee is a small issue.
Unfortunately, many people are concerning only "the cost of software".
They miss "the hidden in-efficiency".

At first, buy one or several copies (not 10's or 100's).

Be an information worker who see and understand data by yourself without waiting an IT department support.

Then, expand later

The most valuable feature of this product is drag-and-drop visual analytics.

By deploying Tableau Server with an interactive dashboard built with Tableau Desktop, our company has gone through a journey of enabling self-analysis, and adopting a data-driven decision-making culture.

As a franchise model, we have enabled our franchisees and master franchisees to prepare self-service financial and operational reports to support their day-to-day operations.

• Better integration with R. Currently, users need to start R before running R scripts in Tableau. Ideally, it would be great if Tableau could save the step of firing up R to start with.
• Introducing more quite-common advanced analytics functions in Tableau. To enable users to perform simple advanced analytics at their fingertips.

I have been using Tableau for three years.

In terms of stability, we encountered compatibility issues when we upgraded the server version from 8.3 to 9.1. Several reports encountered error messages and were not able to render properly. Later, it was resolved by the server administrator together with Tableau support.

We were using Excel-based solutions. Tableau was much more advanced and user-friendly at that time.

Pricing is certainly a bit expensive.

For smaller organizations, Tableau Online would be a better solution. It is always up to date with the latest version, and no complex administrative duties are involved.

For bigger organizations that prioritize data security over cloud infrastructure, Tableau Server could be considered, which would allow full control by the organization.

Ease of use (including frequently used calculations), drag and drop and interactive data visualization are the most valuable features of the product to me.

• Helped organization to identify the best time to roll out the campaign for summer cruise booking.
• Measured health plan product performance to identify health plan product(s) where organization is losing or making money.
• Source-to-destination mapping for health plan members to determine how far members travel to their primary care physician’s office from their residence to identify opportunities for service quality improvements.

We need a Tableau connector to connect to other BI tools like SAP BusinessObjects.

I have been using this product for over three years.

So far, I have never encountered any issues with deployment or stability. I do feel slowness rarely when I try to get data directly by connecting to Teradata database using SQL Query.

Technical support is excellent.

I did a POC with Tableau for my current organization and compared this tool with other BI tools.

I recommended Tableau for the following reasons: truly mature product, price-performance balance, ease of use, lot of flexibilities in regrouping the data on the fly, most of the frequently used calculations are built-in and very easy to use - unlike some other BI tools, which are quite clumsy - and for best interactive data visualization capabilities. Most importantly, a non-IT person can develop a simple dashboard without any IT help.

Initial setup was very straightforward.

I installed the Tableau desktop on my computer. Tableau servers are installed by our internal admins. It’s an easy installation and doesn’t need the vendor’s help.

Sometimes admin gets overwhelmed after Tableau is rolled out in the organization as users get up to the speed in a very short period of time, because of how easy it is to use the tool. Therefore, system access and resource planning should be done and properly planned ahead of time.

People should be aware of the fact that Tableau doesn’t have a semantic layer. It takes a good amount of time to prepare the dataset / data structure. Once the dataset is ready, the data visualization part doesn’t take much time, even for a fairly complex dashboard, because the tool is very intuitive and easy to use.

It provides access to many kinds of data sources. For example: big data/SAP BW.

The second-most valuable feature is the wonderful usage experience. You cannot find this on any other vendor’s solution such as Microsoft or SAP. Even though Qlik’s QlikView is similar.

We use it for a very complex dashboard design showing our raw material trend analysis. Even though there is huge amount of data and information in these dashboards, Tableau easily provides high-quality UI presentations, along with quick response and design times.

Its server lacks traditional BI solution capabilities such as job scheduling, HA and etc. If you want to roll out it as an enterprise-wide application, you must consider many usage scenarios and operation-level items. Tableau has a robust design UI and presentation layer, but lacks many of the capabilities of an enterprise BI solution. We have been using the SAP BO BI solution for many years. We feel Tableau Server still has a long way to go.

I have used this solution for nearly one year.

I have had poor experiences using its mobile app when I demo some dashboards to high-level executives. Sometimes, it does not respond with results very quickly. But, the web UI is OK. I don’t know why there is a discrepancy.

Technical support has been good so far.

We have used SAP BO BI for many years. We liked the WebI /BO dashboard. We also evaluated Microsoft PowerBI and QlikView. Finally, our IT and project team chose Tableau because its UI/user experience is the best.

Its initial setup is simple, but server installation took some time to finish. We use Desktop and Server on our Windows platforms.

We have a local partner to support us. But, we also try each product by ourselves. A vendor partner provides some technical support or Q&A.

ROI has been good so far.

They must understand their real business goal and user’s needs or behavior for using the dashboard design. That impacts your tool’s usage and design approach. Try using Tableau Desktop anyway. Pay more attention to the Tableau community’s sharing or other experts’ design sharing on the website. It will give you many ideas or best design practices and reference.

Desktop – primarily ease of use, TTM, for ad-hoc and reusable analyses and visualizations.

Primarily TTM. The product is used by a number of different groups throughout the company – marketing, services, product engineering...

Server scalability and pricing. Tableau was considered but rejected for a large scale in-house analysis and reporting solution. Even with a large-scale implementation (eight-plus cores), it was decided that Tableau probably wouldn’t scale to the level needed and at that level, was costly.

Desktop was brought into the company five or six years back. Server instances soon followed to support smaller groups.

Desktop installation is easy and straightforward. Out-of-the-box usable.

We have a central IT group that handled server deployments and now handles corporate-wide desktop license maintenance and support with the vendor.

The desktop is fairly intuitive and easy to get started with. Training (on the product, data viz/scientist) is needed for deeper analyses.

As with any solution, do your homework. Understand what it is you’re trying to solve. Tableau is just one of many tools/solutions implemented across the company.

The speed with which it is possible to explore data is, for me, the best thing about Tableau. By this, I mean it is extremely easy to drill into data, which in turn shortens the time from having raw data to having useful, actionable insights. The aesthetics of the dashboards and adherence to data visualization best practices by default is also great.

Our organization’s workflows dictate that the front desk staff are supposed to collect demographic data from our customers. However, we knew that this was not happening. Tableau allowed us to very easily monitor which staff members were adhering to these workflows and which weren't. We could then do very targeted re-training of those staff members who needed it.

Two major improvements that I would like to see:
- A better/quicker interface for formatting graphs and dashboards. The current design takes too much time and doesn't really allow for the same formatting to be applied globally across all of the visualization.
- Improved data formatting prior to visualization. I do know that some improvements are coming with the next major release - for instance, the ability to join data across disparate data source types (e.g. joining CSV and SQL Server DB) - but this is currently a major limitation.

I have been using it for 2.5 years.

For the most part, we have not had any real issues here. That said, our "biggest" data is 10 million rows of mostly discrete data, so we aren't pushing the envelope.

Customer service and technical support have been very good for us. It's worth mentioning that the community forums are VERY active and will often provide answers from Tableau Masters faster than actual Tableau support can respond.

In late 2013, we tested QlikView Desktop and Yellowfin Analytics. They did not seem quite as powerful at the time. However, I have not evaluated those products since. In early 2016, I explored Microsoft Power BI and found the interface clunky compared to Tableau. It is, however, much cheaper.

We found setup straightforward with relatively few surprises. We did have to work through some issues with drivers to connect to a SQL Server 2008 database, which customer support did help with.

We had an in-house implementation (4 desktop licenses, 25 server licenses) and found learning Tableau to be relatively easy for our dedicated analysts (the desktop users). The biggest difficulty we found was getting the Tableau Server users to actually log in to look at the dashboards that we had created for them - often providing them with the data they requested. Getting the adoption by the business decision-makers was the hard part (and obviously that is a problem that would apply to any BI tool).

While I don't have specific $$ numbers, I can say that several reports that we were maintaining previously in Excel that took 4-5 hours to be updated manually each month, now can be updated in 20 seconds. I do think that this would probably be true of any of the products similar to Tableau available on the market now.

The video tutorials available on the Tableau site are very helpful. We spent many hours watching both the step-by-step tutorials as well as the broader webinars highlighting an organization Tableau use case for education and ideas on novel dashboards/metrics to develop.