Tableau Reviews

• Drag and drop-oriented development process that facilitates rapid development of dashboards and reports
• Can connect to any data base in industry
• Sits really well on top of big data platforms
• Sharing and collaborative development is awesome with Tableau Server
• Excellent and visually rich visualizations

It should allow user-defined functions. There are several ideas logged by various Tableau developers in the community and they should implement those ideas as soon as they can.

I have been using it for more than three years now.

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

We are treated as valuable partners by Tableau, the engagement is very stable and we get expertise from Tableau technicians whenever we request it.

I have used other visualization tools in past. However, Tableau is much better than they are; much better compared to QlikView and Spotfire.

Very simple initial set up. Tableau provides setup guides on their websites.

Tableau implemented it for us. Always ask for Tableau's help to determine architecture and implementation of any Tableau server.

This is the best product in this category, among all BI tools available in market; top ranked as per Gartner's Magic Quadrant report.

The properties of each chart: It is helpful because in the world of analytics, not everyone is a developer; there are business analysts and directors as well, who want to play around and find quick solutions. If that requires coding or other settings, it would be more difficult or they don't even think of playing around. For developers, also, it’s easy to build reports as compared to coding.

Tableau gave us better visuals with more settings that help us find a better solution in the analysis world.

Performance improvement: Handling a huge amount of data and loading reports in a minimal time frame.

I used it for about two years, but very little in the past 12 months.

We moved to Tibco Spotfire because of performance issues in Tableau.

Technical support was 7/10.

We previously used SSRS and other analytics tools. We moved to Tableau because of its visual effects and because it was easy to develop with it.

My admin team handled the configuration.

We implemented it in-house, with a little help from vendor support.

Tableau is a good and growing tool in the business analytics world. It’s good to have it, but always compare and find out whether this tool meets your requirements.

The best features of Tableau include:

• Freedom of connection: Its ability to connect to practically any database. There is no need to go through cryptic ODBC or other driver setup procedures.
• Freedom of exploration: The ease one can explore a data table. With simple drag and drop, you can produce easily readable cross tabs and paretos on-the-fly to learn everything you need to know about an unfamiliar table.
• Freedom of expression: You can pretty much build any type of analytic structure you need to analyze your data.
• Built-in visual best practices: Interfaces are clean and simple. You have to work hard to produce an ugly chart in Tableau.

With the ease of using Tableau, I am able to set up basic analytic structures in the meta data (dims and measures) with some starter chart types, then turn over to analysts who can then ask all the detailed questions of the data on their own without having to come back to me for every minor change.

• They still need to improve advanced query functions. Level of detail and table calcs have improved but still are difficult to use, especially when working with large data sets.
• The custom query editor has lots of room for improvement. If Tableau can add features and functionality here, it would be easier to work with the database in one environment, instead of having to open another query editor to develop custom queries for advanced analytics.
• The formatting interface is the one area that has lots of room for improvement, as well as the ability to be more precise in formatting. At the moment, it is much more of an all-or-none proposition.
• More integrated statistical functions.

I have used it since 2009, Tableau 5.

I have not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues. Although I do run into performance issues with Tableau server from time to time, it is not always easy to identify the root cause.

I have had so little need to use customer support, I can’t really rate them. Nonetheless, the few times when I have called, the level of understanding of complex data issues at the first few levels of support seems to be on the light side.

For the desktop edition, initial setup couldn’t be simpler. For the server edition, it is a bit more involved but that is to be expected.

It was implemented in house. For the server edition, an experienced server admin would definitely make the final install better.

My clients find the price tag for the desktop edition high, so they typically try to use the server/interactor edition, which for an analyst just doesn’t provide enough functionality to get the job done. Hopefully, as Tableau builds scale, they will be able to bring the price of the desktop edition down and get on more desktops, like Excel.

I have evaluated other competitive tools but in the end, my clients have always gone with Tableau.

The Tableau on-demand learning resources are fantastic to help a new user get going. There is a robust user community that is very generous with their time and knowledge to help you get through the learning curve.

The live connection to data and publishing are the most valuable features of Tableau. You can connect to your data almost wherever it resides in a straightforward, simple connection. Your local dashboard is only one click away from being online and shareable with other users.

I have used Tableau in the last couple of companies I worked for and it helps any organization that has clients who need visualization.

It can also be very useful for internal purposes.

I would love to see some easier ways for predictive analysis or machine learning in Tableau. The only way to do it at the moment is manually and with the integration of other tools. I’m used to everything being fast and easy in Tableau and I think that can be a significant upgrade.

I have used it for four years.

I did not encounter any issues with deployment, stability or scalability. However, I would prefer an updating system within the tool instead of going to the website and downloading newer versions. Also, major updates are installed as a separate software on your PC, which can only be useful in some rare cases.

Technical support can sometime take a while to respond, but they are very helpful and friendly.

I use a lot of other tools, such as QlikView, because we deal with different clients who use different tools, so we need to have expertise in the different tools provided by the market leaders.

Initial setup is very straightforward and easy. You can install the desktop version in one click with no setup needed. As for the server version, the setup is also easy for non-technical users by following some simple step-by-step guides.

I have implemented through a vendor team and in-house. Because the implementation is easy, I would advise staying up-to-date and always using the latest releases.

ROI is strictly related to how are you using the tool. You can publish dashboards and embed them in a live website which can bring you more hits, or you can provide your users/clients access to your Tableau server, which is related to how much they are paying for that. Use your licenses wisely so they are worth the high amount you’re paying.

The most important thing that people need to know is that Tableau is ONLY a visualization tool (the best in the market). Don’t confuse it with other business intelligence, big data or data analytics tools. If you want to do fast and good looking customizable and interactive visualizations on data from one or multiple sources, Tableau is your tool.

If you want the most beautiful dashboards, Tableau is the answer. If you want to shift your dashboarding/analysis development to your users, Tableau seems to be the best choice, as for the most part it’s quite easy to use.

It offers beautiful visualizations on the fly. New users will catch on to it quite fast for doing simple analysis. Creating complex objects can sometimes get quite tricky, but most of the things can be done very simply and quite faster compared to QlikView.

Tableau is moving fast. In fact, we see it as a leader in the data visualization market. We would like to see improvements in its enterprise capabilities.

It offers the Tableau server for deploying apps that can be shared and used by multiple users, but it needs further improvement to be able to support a large set of users in a big organization.

If you are planning to implement self-service BI in your organization, I see Tableau as the best fit, but you will need to find a good tool for ETL.

Also, if you are required to develop financial reports etc., Tableau might not help you much.

Nonetheless, you can run a Tableau solution without needing a lot of IT involvement.

Tableau needs some improvement in its organization-wide deployment capabilities.

Qlik Sense (a new tool by Qlik) tries to be like Tableau, but if you want something like Tableau, you better go for Tableau.

For visual data analysis, discovery analysis and usability, it is the best product on the market.

For data cleaning, it can be very helpful in showing you where there are holes or mistakes in your data.

In our Project Management office, it has provided us better insight into the breadth of our work and made it much easier to see which projects are at risk. Once we retire our old reporting system (Word docs/PowerPoint), we will be saving about 20 people four hours per week. You can do the math on the annual impact.

Getting buy-in from all of the department leaders has been the toughest part. They are tentative about letting go of the old systems, we have to really prove that our Tableau dashboards fully meet their needs.

This is tough to answer. The company puts more $$ into R&D than any other in the industry and I don't even use all of its current abilities. They put out releases regularly, so at this point this is more about keeping up with the changes and understanding how they are useful to us.

The tool was not created for data structuring, but does provide some functionality.

I have been using it for about 15 months, off and on, at times more than others. I use it on any piece of analysis I can.

We were unable to use LDAP or Active Directory, so all server users have to be created locally. Stability and scalability are not issues; we are just trying to grow adoption. Of course, we have experienced some growing pains but that is normal with any new technology.

Customer support always gets back to me within 24 hours. However, they are not always able to help me resolve my issue.

We have the EBI tool, Oracle OBIEE. Although I never used it personally, our department has experience with several of the top competitors of this product. Despite owning licenses to those tools and using them, the decision was made that Tableau offers self-serve BI better than any of the others. (I was not a part of this decision process, but was moved over from another team to manage the product once the decision was made.)

Initial setup was straightforward. One thing Tableau excels at is documentation that is user friendly. We did bring in a consultant to help this go smoothly but honestly I think he did more harm than good. Could have just followed the playbook.

Implementation was done by a vendor team and in-house. Our middleware team did the heavy lifting and we brought in a vendor team with experience to help us.

ROI has yet to be determined as the implementation is less than a year old. Adoption has been slower than expected but gaining momentum lately. I attribute the slower adoption to the fact that using Tableau is a shift in thinking for those wanting to use it and therefore involves some growing pains that some are hesitant to embrace. However, those that have embraced it are beginning to reap the benefits.

The pricing is a little steep. However, if used correctly, the improvements in productivity will more than outweigh the cost.

It does require you to think about your data in a slightly different way as this is totally different than Excel, so take a little extra time when starting out.

Tableau helps people see and understand their data, answering valuable business questions and giving insight into mountains of information collected over time.

The best feature of Tableau is its simple GUI with drag-and-drop feature. It helps even a rookie create a great visualization. But for experts, it also provides flexibility of writing queries to fetch data. It’s easy-to-integrate feature - with almost all the databases - makes it a great value.

We have used Tableau for creating dashboards for our clients to help them visualize their data for developing business strategies. They can easily use the dashboard for targeting strengths and improving the areas of weakness.

The feature I would like to have is publication of a live dashboard on a webpage, so that dashboards can be incorporated in webpages. We can do this currently on Tableau public but because of data security, we need the dashboards to be private. But in private dashboards, we cannot publish it on webpages. Sisense provides this feature.

I have been using Tableau for the last two years, with the first year being for college assignments. I have exclusively used Tableau for creating dashboards for hotel clients.

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

I rate the level of customer service and technical support 8/10.

I have used QlikView, but I have always found Tableau simpler to use.

Initial setup was simple. I just had to install Tableau Desktop on my system.

An in-house team did the implementation. It’s easy to set up.

Pricing is steep.

If you have the budget, go for it. It’s the best money can get you.
I have loved working with Tableau for its simplicity and ability to handle large volumes of data. However, it’s a bit too expensive.

Actually, the whole product is very valuable for me.

Actually, I am still testing the product before I ask my team to use it, but it’s most likely going to be one of our tools.

I would really like to import data from any online website to make it dynamic.

I would like them to also extend the trial version to 30 days to encourage more people to use it and understand it more. Like an addiction, when you use something for a long time, it becomes a habit. :)

I've used this solution for only one month, and it has been a great experience.

It’s a little bit slow on my system. I don’t know why, but I am looking forward to them developing a lighter version.

Customer service is not bad.

I liked the way when I created an account, they followed up with a call.

Setup is very easy, like any other program.

I've tested a lot of products. I researched which tool is the best for visualization, and I found that Tableau is one of the best for it.

I would say Tableau is a good product to use for data visualization. I recommend it for that and for data analysis.