Tableau Reviews

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.

• Ease of use
• Efficiency
• Integration with sources
• Amazing way to view your data

Data visualization and analysis used to take much longer; we were able to shorten the delivery of the projects by 60%.

I would like to see improvement in licensing. It is expensive to provide licenses beyond the 10 we already have.

I have been using it for four years.

Our deployment issues are related to cost.

No, very stable product

Yes. licensing costs are an issue

Technical support is 9/10.

We didn’t have a data vis solution beyond Excel and MSRS before. I used Spotfire in my business school work.

Initial setup was straightforward. I created a data mart, plugged in Tableau and started creating dashboards.

A vendor team implemented it. Implementation was pretty straightforward – but our data was cleaned and well thought through. I would say, 80% of time should be spent on designing your data mart (if that’s the route you are taking) with clean data and valid data sources.

We haven’t calculated ROI, but we know that we shortened the delivery timeline by 60%.

Make sure you plan it into the 5 year plan - how many licenses you will need, etc.

When time came to select a tool for my work, I did thorough research. I downloaded trial versions of both products and selected Tableau based on my user experience and the ratings (Gartner quadrant).

Beware of licensing costs, but it shouldn’t deter anyone from using this product. Even if you just use Tableau desktop to provide static data vis’s, it’s worth it.

The most valuable features are the ability to use various data sets from different platforms, the intuitive graphs, and the ability to play around with the data and graph selections for different views of the data. As the course work is focused on ‘Big Data’ - both structured and unstructured - the ability to mix some of these sets and have Tableau suggest the best graph was very helpful. Because the product is so flexible, other graphs can be selected and a new ‘view’ of the same data presents a different insight.

All product use was through the school.

Version-specific work did not automatically version up with the upgrade. Since the version change occurred during the course and the majority of us had never used Tableau before, this static versioning for the projects caused some anxiety and some rework. There might have been an easier way to move these projects to the new version, but it was not transparent how to do that and online resources referenced an older version solution that did not work in the newer version.

I was introduced to the product through a few courses in my master’s program in Business Analytics, and was able to use Tableau Desktop for one of the course projects.

I did not encounter any deployment, stability or scalability issues. All product was through the school.

I did not interact with Tableau staff; all support was derived from the school’s IT staff.

The initial desktop setup was phenomenally easy and straightforward. Access to test projects and videos are available to ensure that the product works as expected.

Desktop implementation is user-based and although the setup is easy, it is necessary to be cognizant of where the base files reside and how projects and data sets are stored.

I am unable to provide pricing/licensing advice; the licensing is provided through the school with keys for each student to obtain a desktop version.

Tableau is a very robust engine. As attractive as the speed to combine data sets is and the great visuals it can produce, it is well known that it is not an affordable product if you maintain small datasets. To use a phrase, you don’t need an army tank where a red wagon will do. Because of this, Tableau would need to have a Tableau-lite for smaller businesses, so that it wasn’t so hard to start using the tool, then as the business grows, so does the product if need be.

The most valuable features of Tableau are:

• The ease of learning and use. Tableau is very user friendly. I have a few colleagues at my place of work that had never used it. Within a few months, they created brilliant content.
• The ability to connect to any data source without any reporting layer or meta-data layer needing to be developed. I can connect directly to Oracle tables & views, SQL Server objects, flat files, Excel files, anything. I don’t need to do any additional work in order to achieve this.
• The capability of creating brilliant, creative insights while still achieving data discovery. Tableau makes creating analysis fun and beautiful, while still finding incredible gold nuggets in the dark data of enterprises.
• The culture and support community around the product. There is a true excitement in the Tableau community and anyone who uses Tableau knows what I'm talking about. There are many user group community meetings around the globe that are educational, helpful and fun.
• The ability to share, collaborate and view content through Tableau Server or Tableau Public. It is easy to send users to a web portal to see content analysts create.
• The cost. Tableau is much lower priced than an Oracle-, SAP-, MicroStrategy-type product. The cost is similar to QlikView and a bit more than Microsoft PowerBI on its own (but you need an EA from Microsoft to leverage the lower pricing on PowerBI).
• The support. I can pick up my cell phone and call four people I know from Tableau and get their feedback and help right now.

We now are starting to remove the data silos. We are seeing how data visualization helps to lead to quicker actionable insight. It also has helped reduce the number of reports and dashboards the organization needs.

I am very excited about Tableau 10 and what has been built into the beta. I think with those changes and some we saw at TC15 that are coming, the product is poised to remain the industry leader.

I would like to see Tableau provide a bit better integration with the Microsoft Office platform. You can download your dashboard data to CSV or crosstab, but it’s not optimal. Even if it’s the best dashboard design ever, there are users that still want to see the numbers underneath. Until data visualization reaches a critical mass, like Excel did in the late 90s to early 2000s, we still will need a way to give access to some of the underlying data in an easy way for Microsoft Office to consume.

I have used it for 3 1/2 years.

I have not encountered any issues. Deployment, stability and scalability have been fantastic. We've had a few bugs, two of which were fixed by Tableau support and one took a bit longer and was fixed in a release. However, we've not had long-term outages due to any issues. Installing Tableau is easy. Upgrading the server could be easier, but I think they have addressed that with version 10.

Customer service and support at Tableau is top notch. I haven't seen a better organization in technology with this.

I have used Oracle OBIEE before and Tableau beats that product on cost, usability and ease/speed of development. I don't have to know how to develop the RPD or meta-data layer. Tableau does that behind the scenes when I import a data source. Tableau was also much cheaper than OBIEE.

We also own PowerBI and Tableau is significantly better at ease of use and the number of data sources.

Initial setup was straightforward. We had a rapid start-up "team" come and help us but it was one person and he was done in two days.

Tableau sent out one of their partners, Interworks. I would highly recommend Interworks to help with Implementation. They can make the most of the implementation with their Drive methodology.

Our first dashboard caught an issue in the system and almost completely paid for the server license with the money saved.

Negotiate the server license. The desktop license price is pretty set.

Find a couple of good, quick-win use cases and don't necessarily re-create the dashboard or report in Tableau, but find a way to tell something about the business that wasn't already known.

Data Preparation - This is a huge plus for Tableau as so many users have to spend time preparing the data before using Tableau

• Data Interpreter
• Splits -
• Really helps the average user

Drag and drop analytics:

Tableau 9.0 has a new Analytics pane that provides quick and easy access to common analytic features in Tableau.

You can drag reference lines, forecasts, trend lines, and other objects into your view from the Analytics panel. It is now easy to edit, format, and remove the analytic items that you have added, so you can experiment with different techniques as you explore the insights your data has to offer.

Ad--‐hoc calculations:

Ad--‐hoc calculations make it easy to add and edit calculated fields for your analysis. Double--‐click an existing field on the Rows, Columns, Marks, or Measure Values shelf to begin editing, or

double-click an empty area on a shelf to create a new calculation. As you type, a list of auto--‐complete options appears in a dropdown list, making it easier to find and pick the right elements.

Instant analytics:

Instant analytics provides an interactive experience for comparing summary information about a subset of marks to all the marks in your view. For example, you can compare the average for a few marks to the average for all the marks. After you’ve added trend lines, reference lines, reference bands, or distribution bands to your view, select one or more marks to see the new analytical indicators appear for the selection in addition to the analytical indicators for the whole view.

Level of Detail (LOD) Expressions:

New expression syntax in the Tableau calculation language lets you quickly create calculated fields that compute at the specified levels of detail. LOD calculations help you compute at multiple levels of aggregation and make it easier to create fields for analytical comparison (such as cohort analysis and totals or Average across segments), simplifying calculations that previously took several steps.

It's both intuitive and complex/deep. For our organization, it's given us opportunities to provide both on-sight and on-line training. We now have an online training product that more than offsets the expense associated with days of training. With Tableau, our customers more analytical.

It even has a connection to R and SAS for advanced users.

Also, it has given us the ability to collaborate with the Tableau servers, which is robust and can handle tens of thousands of users.

Tableau Server can now scale for unlimited users Enterprise scale brings with it the need for Governance. Data sources and workbooks must be vetted before they are "out there" to see except for the intended content consumers

The basic design of Tableau has some features that could be modified.

* There is no need to have five (5) ways to add a new worksheet. Brevity is rewarded - new users have so much to learn that 2 ways would do the job

* How to render time - When performing analysis, no single issue is more important than time series data. Tableau uses visual clues in many places - When one uses the pull down option for time that could be visualized better as a continuum. those selections should be presented in green to be visually consistent. Those above in blue.

If you're making a structured, strategic purchase, make sure that you have a plan for professional training.

• Go slow and methodically
• You must consider size of the company and types of users
• Desktop Plus server users - understand the constraints on the backend, and make sure you have enough CPU power
• There's lots of free stuff on their website that's great for the average user.

It is mainly used for reporting and dashboarding purposes.

We implement it for our customers. We have different customers. For some, it is on the cloud, and for some, it is on-premises. Our customers have been using Google Cloud. 

In terms of its version, we are probably using the latest minus one version.

The visualizations are quite rich. It has charts and other visualizations. 

Its performance is pretty good, and the development time is very low.

Its integration with Microsoft products such as Teams should be improved.

I have been using this solution for three years.

It is quite stable.

Its scalability is quite good. The negative side would be the cost, but it is quite scalable.

For the projects we have worked on, one of the projects had about a thousand users, and one of the projects had about 200 users. I handle a development team here, and my team is not very big. It is just a four-member team.

It is used by the management, CXOs, and even the mid-level management people. It's basically for decision-making, so mainly the executive board uses these dashboards.

We have not interacted with them. Our clients deal with that part. We don't do that.

It is not very complicated. Deployment hardly takes a day or two.

We do it on our own. We are a consulting company.

Its cost is quite high. A corporate license costs about 150-200K per year for all the users, but there was probably some discounted amount. This cost includes everything.

A practical piece of advice would be that if you really have a requirement to use Tableau as a tool, you can go for it. Otherwise, there are some open-source and low-cost tools. For example, Amazon QuickSight is a relatively new tool by Amazon, and it is a very good one. It is a very good competitor for Tableau. Apache Superset is another one that has recently been gaining lots of traction. So, it depends on your budget. If you want to have low costing, you can go for these low-cost and good alternatives.

Tableau is quite a mature tool. I would rate it an eight out of 10.

We use Tableau to provide analytics and dashboards. We also use it to automate manual work.

You can create attractive dashboards that inform users using Tableau.

They must have a write-back solution. You must have the ability to write back into the database, otherwise, it prevents full automation.

That's one reason why people still need their own Excel sheets and other tools where they can interact with data that's already in the database. You win completely the moment you load that in, in a central way. You could say that you are completely automated.

They need a write-back; that is what is missing. If they get the write back to the database, they will be fully automated, but for the time being, they are not.

I have been using Tableau for two and a half years.

We are using version 2021.3.

It's a fairly stable product.

Tableau is a scalable solution.

Tableau is used by approximately 90 people in our organization.

We do not intend to increase our usage. I've asked for reports on how many users we get on a daily basis, as well as how many people use it and then don't use it for weeks. How long do they stay if they come in, and what are they looking at?

We are attempting to purchase a tool that will provide us with that information. We know which dashboards are popular, which are not, and why the popular ones are popular while the unpopular ones are not. We need to get an add-on that will tell us exactly what makes the dashboard sticky and what keeps people coming back to use it.

We use technical support, but I don't interact with them directly. Our IT support team is the one who helps us. Our IT support team works with Tableau support to resolve issues, opening tickets and tracking them.

Prior to using Tableau, I used Power BI.

We don't do a lot of installation. Once you have a server license, you can literally create it in the server now that you have a server license. There are no issues with installation.

The installation does not require a lot of time.

We have one or two engineers who maintain this solution.

We have a server team to deploy this solution.

We are paying an annual licensing fee.

I believe it is a good tool, and I would recommend it to others.

I would rate Tableau an eight out of ten.

Whereas we used to present statistics in a traditional way, we now have interactive web-based presentations. 

The most valuable features are data discovery and fine visualizations.

The SQL programming functionality needs to be improved.

It is a very stable solution.

Ths scalability of this solution is good. It depends on your DW design, as opposed to limitations in Tableau. If your DW model is poor then Tableau is not miraculous.

Tableau does not have good technical support.

We previously worked with Qlik, but we switched to Tableau because of its visualization and simpler way of programming. Tableau is also good for data discovery.

The setup and support are not very expensive. In that way, it is not a complex technology.

We are a software consulting company and we have implemented tableau for more than ten clients. 

We are a consulting company and do not track the ROI information for our customers.

Be careful with the Tableau Viewer's licenses, and stay with the right number of users.

Before choosing this solution we evaluated Qlik, BusinessObjects, and Oracle BI.

Be careful with tableau support. Stay in touch with the professional partners because Tableau itself does not have the right number of developers or people for support.