Tableau Reviews

Fluent expressions are beautiful. It provides many alternatives to present and understand business.

I have been in many project manager roles in BI system development, and I have experience with most BI tools during the last 20 years. In most cases, I had to use web development to cover areas the BI tools couldn't handle. But Tableau can solve most of my customers' requests with fluent alternatives.

All area where business insight is needed. Also, I would like to see improvement in server capacities.

Two years.

No.

No.

Excellent. When I or my customers had questions, Tableau customer support addressed the issues quickly, and in the local Korean language.

I have experience with other BI solutions, but all of them had many limitations with respect to all my customers' requests. But Tableau is able to handle them.

Very simple and easy.

Tableau is very good as a starting point for a BI system and environment with relatively low cost. But it's not easy to expand to enterprise level because there is no discount pricing strategy.

Some customers choose Tableau for small systems, but they choose other solutions for enterprise requirements, to reduce costs, even though they know Tableau is a better product.

No.

It's very easy and an excellent solution. Even though this solution is, in my opinion, the best BI solution in the world, they are continuously developing their product, improving with every upgrade (and even with the minor upgrades).

Extraordinary ease of use, easier to use than any competitor product I’ve used in 15 years or so I’ve worked on MI/BI.

Since I originally wrote this, I have found the mapping on Tableau has been extremely useful and easy to use, particularly that it includes very good geocoding for the UK. In terms of the UK, the support and community here is also exceptional and I know that I don't have to trawl through sites endlessly to find solutions, the community is one of the strongest I've seen thus far in BI

Speed of data discovery and accelerated our ability to remodel our data and improve our existing ETL processes.

Expansion of number of visualisations, as well as potential for straight to dashboard function, rather than design individual visualisation – these are, however, genuinely not priority to amend.

Having used another software for a reasonable period of time, I wonder about the chances of incorporating other languages, such as d3.js in future releases (NB I'm still using 8.3)

~3 years

This was a Proof of Concept rather than full roll-out.

No, but important to note it was PoC.

No, but important to note it was PoC.

Excellent.

Exceptional, probably the best user community I’ve ever seen in nearly 15 years of working in MI/BI/Analytical roles.

Currently use an alternative provider, looking to switch to a newer more empowering piece of software, an alternative to Tableau was selected at a Global CIO level.

Extremely simple. Download a package, enter a key post purchase and that’s it. Very easy.

Vendor team – they had (and indeed have) significant knowledge of the product and continue to share best practice tips and knowledge through their e-publications.

Standard software license cost to setup initially and an optional maintenance fee which include version upgrades. On balance, the costs of software balance nicely against the user experience because you probably wouldn’t need to spend a great deal on training as the product is straightforward to use. I continue to use Tableau in my free/personal time but have been using Tibco Spotfire much more frequently in my professional capacity, so will look to update my review of that software as well

Evaluated numerous different BI tools, including but not restricted to Cognos, Jaspersoft, Pentaho, Tibco Spotfire.

Assess the scalability using the Server set up, engage users of the tool independently through the Tableau Community for their ideas and advice on the pro’s and con’s of the tool. Even the biggest evangelists will be honest enough to tell you where it doesn’t meet their expectations.

Various features are valuable. It is intuitive; Tableau have been investing and releasing regularly. A tech-savvy business person can run with Tableau if they have a decent DWH and engineer supporting it. Access rights can quickly get out of hand, but with Tableau's UI and a tech-savvy business person committed to using the product, they can take charge and not have to rely on the tech team.

It is helping to make Makerbot a data-driven company.

A simple mode for new/occasional users might be helpful. Occasional users will always have trouble coping with such a feature-rich product. Unless you are using it every day, and it is crucial for at least part of your job, the learning curve never flattens out. A simpler "mode" which removes many of the more complex features or just hides them in tool "ribbons" might present a less-daunting interface to aid adoption by the vast majority of users.

I have used it for four years (released ~5-10 years ago).

I have not encountered any deployment issues.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer service is good.

Technical support is good.

Domo: inflexible due to lack of expertise and confusing with blurred demarcation between DWH, ETL and BI layers.

Initial setup was straightforward.

I implemented it myself.

We achieved ROI in <1 year.

Don't buy licenses until there is actual demand - buy a couple of full desktops and a couple of cloud licenses and grow from there ONLY when you have tables/reports/dashboards for users.

We also evaluated Domo and QlikView.

Start ASAP with a tiny cohort of hungry users; let them drive it.

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

• Table joins
• Formulas
• Visualization
• Dashboard

I used this product to provide reporting and analysis solutions to my clients. It enabled a small organization to employ a state-of-art reporting tool without massive IT implementation cost (such as servers, ETLs, data admin, etc.). Utilize only basic Excel tables as the data input (5-6 Excel tables), my clients can visualize their quarterly reporting in one reporting package and share with their colleagues.

I would say they could improve the data blending within the desktop version. Ideally, it is better to be done on the server, but for small businesses (or company divisions), the server is not an option due to cost.

For the China market, I would encourage them to offer a license below $1,000 per year.

I used it for six months.

I developed the dashboard / storyboard for just one user, so I had no issues at all, except the limitation on the table join side.

I did not utilize the tech support on my desktop deployment.

I previously used MicroStrategy. I chose Tableau for three reasons:

• Powerful functionality
• User-friendly interface
• Great community

The desktop version is easy to setup.

I implemented it by myself.

On the desktop version, use the community forum wisely; you will be able to find enough support for 99% of your challenges.

Tableau’s flexibility is its best feature. The types of data it handles, and the various data sources, allows me to quickly analyze and present data in ways that Excel (our old way) never made possible.

The old way of preparing reports in the past was to have an analyst extract data from an Oracle database, export the results into an Excel spreadsheet, and then format that spreadsheet for client consumption. This process was very time consuming and the final product rarely consistent, especially visually. Tableau has made it possible to skip all those steps, allowing the analyst to touch the database directly, do the analysis, and create an interactive - and much more informative - report with a standard look and feel. This allows the analyst to “connect” more with the data they’re analyzing and not act as data pullers only.

There are a couple of areas where I’d like to see improvement. One: in creating visual templates so that the vizzes can be standardized with our fonts/layouts/colours. As more analysts are starting to work with Tableau, it is becoming harder to maintain some of the visual standards. Being able to have more control over the layout of sheets on a dashboard would also be helpful. Two: we use a lot of statistical formulae in our work to determine standard deviations, percentiles, etc. Currently I’m working on a project where those SDs had to be pre-calculated in order to create a funnel plot correctly. I’m not exactly sure how we could have done this in Tableau directly without being able to create custom functions.

One tiny thing ... being able to have no colour for a mark would help hide marks you can’t exclude in other ways. Yes, sometimes we have to trick Tableau to do what we need to do ;)

Oh, and one more thing ... we’d love to see more Canada-specific map details built in ... things like health authorities, postal code areas, etc. Creating custom background maps is not easy.

We started working with Tableau (a limited number of licenses) in the beginning of 2015. I’ve been working with it since October 2015. Today, more and more licenses are being added throughout the ministry as Tableau’s benefits and uses become evident.

At this point, we have not had many issues of this sort. We don’t have a server yet. The only thing I can think of is there not being a warning when multiple people open the same workbook to work on – causing work to be lost in the process.

Technical support is very good ... that said, I’ve been lucky to not need it much. ;)

We have SAS (Enterprise Guide) as our main data extraction tool. Some areas of the ministry also use MicroStrategy. After reviewing all three BI tools, it became evident that Tableau offered the best solution for the kind of work we do.

I work in the Performance Measurement and Evaluation Branch and our main task is to monitor and report on the health system’s performance. We get data in a variety of formats from a variety of sources, and at various times throughout the year. In order to analyse and report these types of data, Tableau proved to be the most nimble and flexible of the three.

The setup was very easy – our IT department had no problems installing the software. They did have more trouble getting the Tableau Reader packaged for our enterprise-wide SelfServe store.

I believe it was through an in-house one.

• Data blending
• Storytelling
• Easy-to-use dashboard

It is a self-service tool.

• Enterprise deployment
• Prompting features
• Writeback to tables

I’d like to see extraction after publishing.

I have been using it for three years.

Development report publishing to the test server should have pointed to the test DB instead of the dev DB.

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

Initial setup was straightforward.

I implemented it independently.

An Interworks license is required if you do not directly purchase it from Tableau.

• Rich visualization
• Data blending

Probably, these factors set Tableau apart from many of its competitors.

Because of data blending, we are able to source from multiple data sources. For example, we take the transaction data by connecting to the DB and the goals data comes as Excel from the business. It helps us easily blend the information.

Performance is one big area of improvement I believe. Being an in-memory analytical tool, I think lot of work needs to be done to make the reports’ performance faster.

I have been using it for three years.

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

I rate technical support 9/10.

I've previously used Oracle Business Intelligence and SAP BusinessObjects. Both of them lack the rich viz that Tableau offers.

Initial setup was very straightforward.

Implementation was done in-house.

If you've previously used other BI tools, you need to be aware that Tableau doesn't have any semantic layer like OBIEE or BO. So, you might have to write lot of queries if the report involves complex logic.