Tableau Reviews

I have used Tableau to generate visualizations to calculate system trend analysis for business. 

Tableau has been very helpful to give a high level of insight into our business.

Tableau's most valuable features are user-friendliness and have a connection between multiple source systems. You can publish a report by using Tableau Public and there you can make your data online, not only batches of data, you can use it as an online analytical tool.

There are more than a powerful tool in the market, such as Microsoft BI.

I have used Tableau within the last 12 months.

Tableau is a stable solution.

I have found Tableau to be scalable.

I would recommend this solution for large enterprises.

I have not contacted technical support. However, after reading many reviews others have found the support to be good.

The setup and deployment of Tableau are very easy. I did not have a problem.

The price of Tableau could improve. The license is too expensive. 

There is a 14-day trial version available to those who want to try it.

I would recommend Tableau, but if any organization wants to use it, they can see if the solution fits their business requirement. There is a very competitors market and with a low price. Those wanting to use this solution need to study the requirements to know which repository to use.

I rate Tableau a nine out of ten.

The dashboards give us metrics around the sales of our company. Most are sales reports to let us know how we're doing across different account managers, as well as how we're doing according to our forecast and plan.

The most valuable part of the solution is the general dashboard features. We schedule the dashboards to be refreshed and re-calculated, so they're not live connections but cached dashboards.

With Tableau, when you're dealing with very large datasets, it can be slow so the performance is an area that can be improved.

The security can be improved.

We have been using Tableau across the enterprise for approximately seven years.

We don't have any complaints about stability.

Scalability-wise, Tableau has met all of our needs. Across the organization as a whole, we probably have more than 1,000 users. There are probably 50 power users, who create their own dashboards and reports.

The consumers are sales executives, senior management, C-level, and HR. There are a lot of job categories that use the reports.

The technical support has been pretty good and we haven't had any major complaints about it.

We are currently using MicroStrategy along with Tableau. We began with MicroStrategy, and all of our reports were on it. We had been using it for about 15 years. Tableau is much easier to develop in, so with MicroStrategy, you needed more of an architect to manage the metadata. Because Tableau is a lot simpler to implement, we've been able to train people to do their own reports, so it's much better from a self-service perspective.

Security-wise, Tableau is not as robust as MicroStrategy.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

We initially had a third-party vendor come in and help us with the setup. They led that effort, but since then, we've managed the environments ourselves.

We have an in-house team that takes care of maintenance.

Tableau is not as cost-effective as Microsoft BI.

We are thinking about switching to Microsoft Power BI from MicroStrategy and Tableau. Cost is a factor that is driving us toward the Microsoft solution.

I would rate this solution a nine 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.

The ease and speed of creating visualizations and interfaces with any database are this product’s most valuable features.

It is able to provide answers within hours instead of days. Typically, we would have to create a SSIS package to connect to that database, then create a SSRS report and meet with the users a few times before coming up with the final visualization product. With Tableau, we can create all of these in one session.

It would be great if the licensing cost per user was cheaper.

I have been using it for one year.

We currently cannot use version 9 because we have to wait for our Tableau Server to be upgraded to version 9 first.

Technical support is good.

We were previously using SSR for reports and SSIS for retrieving the data.

Installing Tableau Desktop was easy.

We worked with the Tableau team.

I would recommend lowering the licensing cost per user.

I would recommend that everyone use this product.

It helps me deliver a tool to my clients that can be easily customized according to their business needs. Also, it provides great insights and analytics on huge volumes of data coming from disparate sources, which has helped my clients and managers make sound business decisions.

The most valuable features of the product are:

• Most importantly, flexibility
• Visual features
• Filters
• Actions
• Parameters
• Interactive dashboard building

It helped my organization by winning more client work, as clients love interactive visualization.

Tableau has also helped our managers make better decisions and, more so, quick decisions. With Tableau's quick querying and ad-hoc visualization features, many important processes have been automated and thus Tableau has provided a quick turnaround time for product/project delivery.

Example: My company's auditors historically audited financial statements and transactions from the customer's ERP system via sampling methodology, which did not encompass the entire transactional data and thus did not provide 100% assurance to our clients. With Tableau's advanced data analytics features, we were able to build a tool that is tailor-made to the auditor's needs and thus provides 100% assurance over the entire data set.

The most important feature that Tableau must introduce is to provide 'reference hints' for every dimension and measure. For example: When working with numerous dimensions and measures, it's difficult to debug and back track to determine whether a certain dimension was used in a visualization, tool tip, filter, parameter, or action. It would be great to debug and back track already developed Tableau dashboards.

I’d also like to see the following features introduced or improved:

• Auto-Save or Backup feature. There have been quite a few instances when Tableau crashed after substantial dashboard development and I had to start over from the scratch because the work was not saved. The best workaround for this is to be diligent and create manual backups and save as work is progressing.
• Performance with 32-bit computers. There have been numerous instances when Tableau threw an out-of-memory error when working on a 32-bit system.
• Performance in general. Tableau works best with light data sets. Although extract optimization is a good way to improve performance, it can be better.
• I feel the user interface for adding actions is complicated. It can be made simple and intuitive.

I have used it for two years.

I like the online community.

I have previously used Excel and SSRS. Tableau provides more flexibility than these tools and is very intuitive to learn.

Initial setup was very simple.

It is best suited for in-house development, as it provides on-demand customization.

A bit costly, but worth investing.

It totally depends on the requirement of the client/user. One should research the following tools before investing - Spotfire, Tableau, SSRS, Excel, SAS, SAP Lumira, etc.

The ability to analyze data patterns in more visual dimensions (size, shape, color) than are realistically possible in Excel is the functionality most valuable to me.

Calculated fields are relatively simple and may leave a user wanting. Joining between multiple datasets also needs to be improved. (I heard this is an improvement that will be made with the version 10 release this summer.) Source data formatting requirements are a little particular, and reloading for new users can get repetitive.

I am a management consultant, and I have used this solution for multiple clients over the last two years.

I never had to use customer service.

Initial setup was extremely easy; when downloading the trial version or purchasing, just accept the defaults. There aren’t many ways you can screw this up.

I’d suggest taking the following steps:

1. Define what you want to get out of the tool. (People don’t always need these types of solutions, and this becomes evident once they actually get in there with the data they have.)
2. Make sure you have the existing data needed.
3. Download a trial version and play with the software and develop prototype dashboards and analysis
4. If you actually have a recurring need, then I’d look at purchasing Tableau desktop. If the need for use and analysis extends to many across the organization, Tableau Server could be your best option.

I also evaluated Qlik and Spotfire, but found Tableau to be more intuitive and visually appealing.

This product is the best visualization solution on the market. My rating is based on ease of use, visual appeal and additional functionality over Excel.

It's easy to start using to deliver off-the-shelf visualizations. It makes it easy to share dashboards with a team. It's a comprehensive solution that can scale from desktop (analyst, developer) to server (large end-user audience) with small or no changes.

In my experience, its greatest achievement has been opening stakeholders' minds. It pioneered the self-serve trend (which may have social roots) where people "own" their data and IT is a service provider to ensure visualization content is based on robust data. Connecting to a massive number of sources (that can be blended in Tableau) has also contributed to this achievement.

It came at a cost. Developers end-up, many times, scratching their left ear with the right hand, in order to make visualizations more powerful, effective or appealing than off-the-shelf ones. The next challenge for Tableau will be combining ease of use for basic-to-mid level complexity design (self-serve, "power users") with flexibility and repeatable development in a corporate environment (professional designers), avoiding "hat tricks" or "cookbook" style.

Also, when building corporate dashboards, it may be challenging to gain the type of control needed without having to resort into some forum tricks or Zen-Master's advice. Workbook, connection versioning, and governance would be great for mid-to-large size organizations. Server-wise, having options to trigger alarms to an Administrator under certain conditions would also be an asset.

I've been using both Tableau Desktop and Server for four years.

No problems at all. Very robust and well documented (both Desktop and Server versions)

No problems, at least with the data sources I have used Tableau so far - MSSQL 2008 & 2012, Teradata RDBMS 14.x, and MSAS Cubes.

Tableau can scale to massive datasets without problems (I used a few, approximately one billion-row tables), provided a DBA is part of the team to fine-tune tables and views. The proprietary columnar database engine is very fast and robust.

It's great.

It's great, although forums are usually the first resource to get answers from.

I have helped customers migrate from MS Pro-Clarity and Oracle Hyperion.

Tableau is not a demanding platform in pre-set environments before rolling-out as long as tech specs are met. However, certain design decisions need to be made in advance to ensure good performance and smooth scalability on a Server deployment (e.g. permissions, standards, etc.).

I act as an implementation consultant.

Go through the exercise of planning short and mid-term to understand what the best licensing model is e.g. per Core vs. Named Seats, number of Designers, etc.

Understand your organization's profile. Do you have or want/need to develop power-users or will you use traditional IT developed dashboards in an intranet/internet? Although Tableau can fit both scenarios, the first option would be the most benefited one when compared to other solutions. Look into redefining the relationship between business stakeholders and IT, since the former will demand more consumable information for analysis instead of packaged reports.

The primary use case of the solution is for it to be used as a visualization tool. It is a counterpart of Microsoft Power BI and is used for visualization and reporting purposes.

The solution provides the leverage of having custom visualization and the capability of self-service. I can drag and drop and create reports based on requirements. Data blending comes within self-service, allowing me to generate information.

There should be a generated AI feature that can be added to enable me to generate information. The visualizations should be user-friendly and allow for more custom visualizations.

I have over six years of experience using the solution.

I would rate the stability as three when comparing it to Tableau and ten being the least stable. So, I consider it to be a seven out of ten in terms of stability issues.

In terms of scalability, while it is better than PowerView, it is not as good as Cognos or Microsoft Azure.

Customer support is very satisfactory, and I would rate it as eight out of ten.

Positive

I am the implementer of the tools.

The overall rating for the solution is seven out of ten.