Tableau Reviews

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.

Tableau is good for routine dashboards, and it has integration with Slack, through which it can send you daily updates.

Areas for improvement would be visualization and augmented analytics. In the next release, I would like to see automated insights from the data added to the dashboard.

I've been using this solution for about six years.

Tableau can be a little slow when loading, and it can fail with higher gigs or terabytes of data.

From working with my data analyst, I get the impression that Tableau can't take the load when scaling.

We had embedded technical support from Tableau in our enterprise, who was awesome and kept Tableau updated at all times.

Tableau is pretty good, interface-wise - it's easy to understand and to download data. It also has the most functionalities and capabilities of any tool. However, it doesn't have anything that differentiates it from its competitors, unlike Adobe Analytics' strength in visualization and data capture. If someone is looking for routine dashboards and wants operational dashboards, Tableau is the best solution. However, if they want to drive strategic decisions, they may have to look into a different product. I would rate Tableau as seven out of ten. 

I am into a new healthcare domain. I publish my dashboards and my audience are the providers.

I am not well-versed with the latest 2020 version of the solution, but I have heard that it has made parameters dynamic. For example, when we are publishing the dashboards, if we want the dashboards to be set as a default as the previous month, we do not have to modify it again and again. It can republish month after month using an assigned default. This will save me time from not having to redo the dashboard all the time. The dynamic parameters are amazing in Tableau, it has been improved in the latest version.

I love the customization skills that Tableau has, it is not restricted to what is built-in already. We have many customizable options and they come out to be very fancy and beautiful charts. Also, I like the extract feature that makes my dashboard run faster. The low-level security that Tableau handles works well. This solution is user-friendly and suitable for any type of user. Lastly, the dashboard and reports are very user-friendly to navigate.

This solution has some features which really needs to be improved. For example, the sorting feature, If we compare it with ClixSense, ClixSense has a direct sorting feature available to users. Wherein Tableau, we have to go and create a parameter, make it dynamic, force users to click somewhere else on the filter, and then maybe you can sort it. Tableau is really new for sorting features.

With performance tuning, it generates a pretty complex query when it is not required. We do not actually write 100 lines of code for a single KPI indicator. What we do is run the performance tuning model which will give 100-200 lines of code for a single KPI. That is not exactly an optimized query. While running performance tuning on the query, it should be pretty optimized, but it does not seem to be doing this.

I have been using the solution for three years.

The solution is fairly stable. However, the issue is when it is time to upgrade. Upgrading a Tableau server is too tedious compared to other tools where normally you just have an update EXE file you run and it is done. This is not the case with Tableau, it requires the dashboard to go down for an hour and then we have to republish all the dashboards again. 

The solution is scalable without a doubt.

This solution has the best technical support compared to any tool. 

The solution is expensive but it depends on the customer's needs which will determine the cost of the licensing. How much they require and what package they want.

We have evaluated ClixSense in the past. With ClixSense, it is not as customizable as this solution, I would even say restricted. For each and every customization and format change, the basic stuff, it asks us to buy another extension. We will not be doing that.

This solution has broadened my VA exposure and it has allowed me to do things differently with respect to VA concepts and visualization. I have a great takeaway from my experience with the solution.

I would recommend Tableau because of the amazing dashboards that are appealing and that also gives us the ability to create with far better customizations.

I rate Tableau an eight out of ten.

Tableau is good for data analysis.

The most valuable feature is the geographic data analysis.

It provides functionality for sending email alerts.

The performance is good compared to some other products.

It should offer better features for customization. It would be nice to have features such as border design.

I have been working with Tableau for three years.

This is a stable product.

The technical support is good.

I have worked with Pentaho and Microsoft BI. I found that the performance of these products didn't compare with that of Tableau.

The price of Tableau is high, although there are different types of licenses available.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.