I had the chance to get to Tableau Customer Conference in early November 2012 and thanks to exceptionally good organization of the event I was able to greatly enhance my picture of Tableau (which I first reviewed 2 years ago) and get answers to some questions.
Below are my impressions from Tableau (which I haven't used in real projects yet) in comparison with QlikView -- tool I've been working with since 2009.
First thing I'd like to tell -- starting from version 8 Tableau can honestly be considered a truly mature product -- a big difference with what I saw two years ago. It's a smartly designed, feature-full and powerful analytic tool which is especially good for ad hoc query and analysis (Q&A). Prior to Tableau I considered BusinessObjects WebIntelligence to be the best Q&A tool on the market. However, in my picture of BI world this honorable title now belongs to Tableau.
Here is what I liked (not in order of importance):
- State-of-art data visualization makes Tableau outstanding in the crowd of BI suites. Tableau people talk about "being creative with data" and it's easy to believe in this while looking at clean and elegant Tableau dashboards. By the way, in French tableau has two meanings -- painting and table. Artwork and data. Excellent match of brand and product concept.
- Drag-n-drop authoring as cornerstone of analysis and design processes. That's what WebIntelligence was good at, but Tableau makes it even better, simpler and easier. Sadly QlikView has almost nothing to offer here -- fields still...
Read the rest of the post at http://bi-review.blogspot.co.il/2012/11/impressions-from-tableau-in-comparison.html