Tableau Reviews

We use it for dashboard designing.

It has improved our organizational departments, like sales, HR, etc.

The most valuable feature is the 3D charting.

They need to improve the bar chart position and width.

Easy visualization, with only drag & drop, double-click!

Yesterday: Excel -> pivot table -> graph ....think...think...think and re-work because of no insight.

Today: Double-click or drag & drop and see....see...find insight.

• Korean geographic map at the detail level
• Polygon map is a hot requirement from end users

Korean users want the Tableau default map function to be one more detailed level
when they would visualize Korean territories.
----------------
Country : South Korea
Great area(OOO-do) : Seoul city, Busan city, KyungKi-do, Chungchung-do,...
County(XXX-gu): Mapo-gu, Seocho-gu,.Gangnam-gu these are covered by Tableau 10.

It needs more detailed level (GGG-dong) that is Seocho-dong, Minrak-dong, Woomyun-dong as these are not covered yet.

I have been using Tableau for six months.

DB speed, but it's a complicated issue that could be caused by Oracle? Excel? Tableau? N/W? etc...

I rate the level of customer service and technical support 9/10.

Initial setup was easy: Download the software and drag an DB file(i.e. excel) onto the Tableau icon.

That's it. There is no easier way to get started.

End users should "study" the software.
Do not wait for the IT department any longer.
Do it yourself.

Return = time saving, efficiency.
Investment = license fee & study time.

When you consider how much time is wasted on DB work, including visualization, the license fee is a small issue.
Unfortunately, many people are concerning only "the cost of software".
They miss "the hidden in-efficiency".

At first, buy one or several copies (not 10's or 100's).

Be an information worker who see and understand data by yourself without waiting an IT department support.

Then, expand later

• Very easy and fast to build dashboards, compared to many other BI tools
• Has connectivity options to various data sources
• Good community support and very useful free training videos

Clients are pleased with the beautiful and interactive dashboards. They are also happy with the noticeable shortening in time to production.

If it had a semantic layer, it would be great. I know Tableau is not meant for data modeling but the data warehouse is not always perfect. Without a semantic layer, we need to reach out to the ETL team for even small data model changes.

Also, a semantic layer would have allowed for building 'subject areas' by grouping tables and defining joins. This would then allow users with appropriate permissions to build ad-hoc reports without having to worry about table joins.

I have used it for 1.5 years.

We did not have any issues with deployment, stability and scalability. We deployed Tableau Server in the AWS cloud.

We have contacted customer support few times and the support team always came back with solutions / work-arounds promptly. So, customer service and technical support is good.

We evaluated a few other solutions, but we chose Tableau because of the speed with which we can build reports, the simple deployment (cloud), easy scalability and the cost factor.

Initial setup was straightforward and in fact very simple.

An in-house team implemented it, but we went for AWS cloud-based deployment, which was not complex.

Try the trial versions and explore all of the features before going in; it is very useful. Also, the training videos on their website are good.

The most valuable feature of this product is that business people with no technical background can autonomously design and implement their visual reports, relieving the IT staff from this burden. On the other hand, despite its ease of use, the tool does not support highly complex visualization and filtering mechanisms.

The adoption of this platform has improved the interaction between the IT and the business departments, through an increased awareness and more effective involvement of business users in the definition of business requirements and reporting needs. Now, the IT people can mainly focus on the setup and administration of suitable data sources published on the server that business users can directly connect to and explore with Tableau's visual tools.

I would give it a perfect rating if it weren't for a few flaws and limits that make it slip off from perfection.

There are some weaknesses in the desktop tool that could be greatly improved, concerning the dashboard layout management and the initialization of parameters.

There are also some frustrating limitations in its data engine that sometimes make it hard to handle filtering and combining data from multiple data sources in the same dashboard. Hopefully such limitations are expected to be solved in the next upcoming release, version 10.

We have been using this product for more than two years.

We have never encountered relevant issues with our deployments. Only once, and for a limited time, we encountered a JavaScript incompatibility with Google Chrome browsers.

The technical support is very responsive, as well as customer service. They easily escalate to the developers if a bug or a performance issue arises.

Previously, we had been using the SAP BusinessObjects suite for BI reporting. There were too many issues regarding the complexity in development, the deployment of reports and, mostly, the performance and stability of dashboards.

After the bad experience with SAP BusinessObjects, we evaluated and adopted Tableau for its amazing straightforwardness in the representation of geo-referenced data on maps, which was a strict requirement from our sales & marketing department.

This is probably one of the major strengths of Tableau: It enables organizations to set up and run a collaborative BI reporting platform in just a few days, with a smooth learning curve.

Of course, fine tuning of operating parameters - when it comes to optimizing performance - requires some more care, but really the administration of the system is easy compared to other equivalent platforms.

We first started alone with in-house activities. Then, at a later time, we got some support from a local consulting company that was a Tableau partner.

In my opinion, a medium-sized company could adopt the platform without any significant support from outside.

I’m not in a position to make a reliable evaluation of ROI. However, I can firmly say that the cost of licenses is pretty fair and surely more convenient compared to other competitors.

The best way to have a clear perception of the potential of this product is just downloading a trial version of the desktop application and play with it a few days. In my case, that experience was clearly decisive in making the decision to buy.

Its desktop application is a beautifully designed tool - very powerful and intuitive. It allows a business user, with no knowledge of databases and query languages, to build in a matter of minutes complex and compelling visual dashboards that enable users to detect and highlight interesting patterns in data. The dashboards created can be published and shared through Tableau Server, a powerful web platform where dashboards are rendered efficiently in HTML5. A cloud version and a free public version are also available.

• It's easy to connect to, and supports, a variety of datasources
• It supports multiple languages well, which is very convenient for me. When I develop a dashboard in English or Japanese, it can display time differently based on the language you choose. For example, EN: 2010/01/01, JP: 2010年01月01日.
• Stunning graphs, easy to drag & drop dimensions into your dashboard.
• Compresses data well.

We use it to develop dashboards for our customers; they will use these to analyze their business using BI knowledge.

• Multiple choice for filter selection. This is a very big shortcoming.
• Dynamic parameters.
• Currently, it cannot aggregate further on a measure that has been aggregated already
• A button function for dashboards. Sometimes, we need a button to link to another dashboard.
• Display/hide an object based on a parameter as a real function, not using tricks. You can do it using tricks, but it looks so ugly.

I have used it for about two years.

As I mentioned above, sometimes we need to use tricks to develop dashboards, and it has stability issues.

I rate the level of customer service and technical support 8/10.

Initial setup was very easy; just "agree", "next" and "finish".

Our IT support team did it.

No complaints. Reasonable price for professional version.

• QlikView: not worth trying. Not good for support (Qlik Japan); ugly charts; limited functions. It’s one strength is that it's free.
• IBM Cognos: very scalable. You can do anything with your dashboard/report using HTML; good at all functions. However, it's only suitable for big companies, hard to maintain, and very expensive.
• Oracle PBCS/Essbase: good for medium-sized or big enterprises with big/multi-dimensional data; supports Excel. Difficult to set up, and browser-based PBCS is so bad, you may lose your work at any time because of its corrupt JavaScript.
• Tableau is good for small-sized companies; reasonable price. But you get what you pay for: limited functions. It's a data visualization tool, not a BI tool.

The product’s performance is better than other tools. The working speed is good. Creating visualization on Tableau is somewhat easier than other tools.

The product has some limitations. Creating empty extracts is not easy. We faced some issues in the initial phase. Creating extracts side by side with multiple lines is not possible in Tableau. This feature is available in Power BI.

If we want to make any changes to the server, we must have the Administrator role. The product should also allow users with Explorer roles to make these changes.

I have been using the solution for the past three and a half years.

The tool is stable.

The tool is scalable. Around 50 people are using the product in our organization. Everyone knows about the product. We have around seven administrators. The number of administrators varies based on the project and tasks.

The technical support is good. I raise a ticket in Tableau Community if I get stuck at any point. I can get the solution easily from the community.

Positive

I am also using QuickSight. When we create multiple visualizations and multiple sections using Tableau’s dashboard, the way of executing the visualization is quicker in Tableau compared to other tools. We can pull millions of data and create millions of tables. Apart from the performance issue, compared to other tools, the product provides the best and most advanced features.

The initial setup is easy. The time taken for deployment depends upon the data, the visualization, the types of reports, and the number of cards.

We are also learning to use other tools. It is beneficial to learn Tableau. It will help us in the future. Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

We use the solution for financial, sales, production, quality reports, or dashboards.

The solution provides our company with easy access to relevant information.

The ease of use is its most valuable aspect. 

The solution allows for the possibility for end-users to do their own reporting. They have access to the use of standard dashboards and so on.

The initial setup is pretty easy.

The stability has been good.

The product needs to allow for better ways to drill down more effectively on the information at hand. Users should be able to dive into the information in an easier way. Right now, it's a bit too difficult. 

We have been using Tableau for about five years.

The stability of the solution is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

That said, initially we had some performance issues. That has been the biggest issue: performance. Especially in our case, as we are using it as a performance database. However, any initial issues have been solved now.

My understanding is that the solution is scalable. We are currently around 400 users and the roles are typically in finance, sales, marketing, and production.

It's the only tool for certain information, therefore, it's very widely used. We are really, really relying on it and that is growing. We are, during the next six months, closing old reports on the old business VPSH Virus environment. When that is done, this will be the only source of information when it comes to certain financial figures.

I'm not so much involved in the technical support side anymore, however, it has been good once you have gotten access to it.

We were using mainly SAP Business Warehouse and also the model solution, however, the biggest solution was based on SAP Business Warehouse and we are replacing that one due to the end of support for that tool.

The initial implementation process was rather straightforward. Yes.

The deployment has been ongoing. The first report to be published was done in about two months or something like that, however, it's an ongoing deployment as we are increasing the information all the time. The use of it is growing from, from month to month.

In terms of maintenance, currently, there are about four persons and their roles are weeding backend development to make sure that we get the data for IT management and the front end development.

We did have some help from a third party. We didn't need much help, however, there was some. Our experience was very good.

I'm not sure about our licensing costs at this time. We have changed license models during the journey.

We did evaluate other options. At the end of the day, it came down to the license cost and the ease of use. 

I'm a customer and an end-user.

I don't remember the version number. It could be the latest or the second latest.

I would advise potential new users to make a proper evaluation to make sure that it fits their needs. There might also be other solutions on the market today that they should comply with to make sure that they get the best solution. They should be cautious about how they have, what kind of availability they have to access data from other systems.

Also, it's important to make sure that you have educated the end-users in the proper way.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten overall. There's always room for improvement. Even if it was the most cost-efficient solution at that time, it's still costly, of course, to implement these kinds of tools. I'm also a little bit concerned about if they are a part of Salesforce, what that will mean for us in terms of impact.