Tableau Reviews

• Ease of use
• Data visualization
• Predictive analytics and forecasting

We are a consulting company, so we could use it internally. However, this is more for other clients. It does help those clients in analyzing their data.

There are certain things that I would want it to do, but it wouldn't be something that I could easily describe.

I have been using this solution for around three years.

It all depends. You have to make sure that you've designed the data part well. It is doing better at handling scalability. In other words, you can throw more users at it and it shouldn't impact the system performance.

The setup part depends on what Tableau products you're using. For Tableau Desktop Developer, the setup was very straightforward.

Make sure that you have your requirements and your use cases. You need to know what exactly you are trying to solve. You need to know the story that you are trying to tell. The business needs to know.

If you are an IT organization, then you need to understand what the business is trying to do before you just go and start using the product.

Tableau was able to handle the challenges that we've had, in terms of reporting and analytics. It's flexible enough, so that you can bring in other data and be able to quickly marry that data with what you have, report on it, and be able to tell the story that the business wants fairly quickly.

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.

• Ability to read multiple data sources
• Beautiful visualizations#
• Easy to learn and use

Tableau does an excellent job upgrading the software with each release. One thing we have been waiting for is the ability to import an ArcGIS Shapefile into a custom map. There is a workaround using a third-party utility but it is unstable.

I have used it for more than three years.

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

Installation was a cakewalk. Over the last three years, there have been at least eight upgrades and three major releases; all upgraded without incident. Our Tableau Server has been running continuously for over three years. We have had two separate up scales; both were successful.

I rate the level of customer service and technical support 10/10. I’ve been working with vendors for over 25 years. No one else comes close.

While we use several BI tools, this was the first visualizations platform we purchased.

Initial setup was very straightforward.

We implemented it ourselves. It was very easy.

Pricing/licensing comes in two methods; named users and core licensing. We started with named user accounts, buying only what we needed when we needed it. As demand for the platform grew, we upscaled to core licensing. That approach was practical for us.

Prior to purchase, we did evaluate several other vendors. We choose Tableau based on Gartner research, deployments at peer institutions and finally, price.

Start now, start small and grow. This isn’t like your traditional BI platform, where you have to spend years designing the infrastructure before the first report comes out.

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.

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.

We use Tableau for the all kind of dashboards.

Tableau as a BI solution provides a platform to develop user-friendly, story telling dashboards, which provide insights to help management take decisions.

The solution has a lot of customization when comparing to Microsoft BI.

The customization requires a lot of effort and should be simplified. The performance could be better. When comparing the performance of Tableau to other solutions, such as Microsoft BI, they are not as good.

I have been using Tableau for approximately four years.

The stability is very good.

Tableau has good scaling capabilities.

We have approximately 30 to 40 users using this solution in my organization.

The support is good for Tableau. However, if we ask for a certain feature they will not entertain us, unless other customers are also asking for the same feature.

Positive

We previously were using Microsoft BI and we switched to Tableau because of the increased level of customization it provides. Microstrategy can also be a considerable alternative.

The installation is complicated and took us approximately four hours.

It would be best to use an integrator or other professional assistance for the implementation.

We have approximately two engineers that handle the maintenance of the solution.

Our management can take decisions based on insights provided by Tableau, which are smart and help us reduce costs and data issues.

There is a license for the use of this solution and it is on a per-user basis. The server is free but the users you have to pay for.

We performed a POC before going with Tableau, we tried Power BI because Power BI is competing against tableau. But to use Power BI at its full potential, you need the Power BI cloud edition, which our organization cannot go with. So the obvious choice was to go with Tableau.

Tableau is very good, but customers have to understand the requirements of hardware and software the way Tableau works. If they have some requirements that Tableau cannot meet, they will understand how to do it in an alternate way.

I rate Tableau an eight out of ten.

Tableau is easy to use.

Tableau has so many functions, so sometimes it's hard to find the right solution quickly. I have to search multiple menu bars to find the right command.

I started working with Tableau two years ago.

In some projects, Tableau isn't stable. Sometimes it calls automatically.

Tableau is scalable. Right now, 200 to 300 people at my company use it.

Their web-based tech support is okay.

Setting up Tableau is easy.

Tableau's price should be lower so more people can access this application.

I rate Tableau eight out of 10.