Tableau Reviews

The following features were why we picked Tableau:

1. Ease of use and integration.
2. Analysis of data without need for coding.
3. Gold standard intuitive, interactive, visualization experience.

Non tech users are able to use the self contained platform, interact with data and share findings.

1. Tableau Online does not have any way of automating the usage reports. You can download them as a PDF but have to do so manually to distribute them. There is no way to schedule these reports for business users who would like to measure users activity.
2. While you can see how many licenses are used, there is no way to see how many licenses are available for use. You have to contact support to get this information.

We have used this solution for six months.

No, we have not experienced any downtime or stability issues as yet with Tableau Online.

No, we have not experienced any scalability issues as yet with Tableau Online.

I would rate the technical support as eight out of 10. There are some inherent issues that are related to versions that they were not able to sort out and tickets remained unresolved.

We used SSRS as our reporting solution. We switched because the deployment was archaic.

We deployed the solution using IFrame via Salesforce.com. We experienced issues while configuring SSO through SAML.

Tableau was not accepting any metadata files that were uploaded whether they were new or ones that have we had worked on in the past. It claimed they were “invalid”. We opened a support ticket to find that this was a known issue. With the help of support, the issue was resolved at the Tableau back end.

The quote is only valid for 15 days. There may be price changes (after 15 days) that might impact your cost and finance budget.

We evaluated eight vendors: Power BI, Tableau, Qlik, SAS, MicroStrategy, Domo, Sisense, and R Shiny. We compared FOSS and COTS options, assessed feature sets, vendors, and support. COTS was preferred, with Tableau edging out Power BI.

Be sure to review all the vendors and features/functionality. There are many products out there in the market today.

• 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.

Self-service.

Talking about self-service, now we can provide information enterprise-wide. Before Tableau, about 15% of the organization had access to information; now with Tableau, about 80% of the organization have access to our data warehouse, and other information sources such as Excel and SQL Server databases.

Well at this point, we are in the process of implementing the in-memory feature for our costing process. We need to have online costing information. We think if we have more parameters or tools to customize this feature, we can improve the performance in the processes that generate and load the information.

I have used it for two years.

We can tell you that Tableau 8 had issues mainly with SQL Server databases, but with Tableau 9 and above, the issues with SQL Server have been solved and now we have a very stable solution.

Our local vendor support (in México) was so bad!!! However, we have encountered in the online support a very good source of information that helps to solve our issues. In fact, we have submitted a lot of cases to the Tableau support team, with very fast responses.

We evaluated other solutions, and selected Tableau mainly because of the licensing costs.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward; we only had one issue with the Active Directory configuration.

Our in-house training program consisted of two teams for one week: one team for Tableau administration, and one team for Tableau super users.

I think that it is good advice to consider a well-organised implementation program.

I don’t have authorization to provide numbers for our organization, but I can say that Tableau is a product with great price performance.

Tableau is a user-friendly product, but I think that is very important to consider a well-organised training program based on the user roles (administrators, super users, information consumers, etc.).

The drag and drop feature that provides self-service analytics with absolutely no coding is the most important feature. It’s pretty strong in geo-spatial analysis as well.

We are a services vendor for this product and our team have grown over 300% in just one year just providing support for this product, among others.

While they continue to make a lot of changes for every version, in the current BI landscape, they need to be more device agnostic, especially to compete with other similar products in the market.

I have been using this product for more than three years now. I started with version 8.0. I have been through 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 and then to 9.0, 9.1, 9.2 and 9.3.

With data exploding exponentially, handling huge data that runs into billions of records is still a concern at an enterprise level. Organizations will also have to understand the right use cases, but then affordability would come into picture, where organizations do not want to invest on different tools. They try to make best use of the available tools.

The customer service has been great from Tableau. They also have different categories defined for premium service.

The installation and configuration of Tableau consists of just a few clicks. I don't think it can get better than that.

The implementation has been done in-house. In fact, as service providers we implement for others. Once the requirement is frozen and architecture has been decided, implementation is fairly easy and straightforward.

The ROI is immediate.

The price-war has already begun among competing tools. However, I still believe Tableau is fairly priced and there are multiple options.

The team I am part of works on different tools, not just Tableau. The tools are chosen based on the use case. Tableau is not the best choice for traditional reporting, which are still in demand.

Use this tool with the right use cases. Use your creativity to build dashboards. It’s a great tool for data discovery.

• Easy and intuitive chart creation
• Easy conversion between different chart types and crosstabs
• Easy map-based charting
• Built in geo coordinates for cities, states, countries- Easy-to-create fields with formulas
• Ability to connect so many kinds of data sources

• Now, the business decisions are "data driven" based on Tableau
• There are standard interactive reports/dashboards.
• And there is a dedicated data analyst role.

• Tableau can handle only one joined/denormalized table, e.g. students, classrooms, teachers.
• Sometimes I need to analyze the joined/denormalized table from multiple perspectives in one single workbook.
• Create analysis both for students, teachers and classrooms
• To use simple drag-and-drop is not enough to show
  
  • Average student age per classrooms or teachers because some students have classes multiple times in the same classroom
  • Average grades per teacher
• Sometimes I would like to analyse both student-classroom and teacher-student or classroom-student relations out of the original joined/denormalized table.
• I think the Qlik Sense approach is better for this very specific case.

I have been using it for nine months.

Tableau 8.3 did not scale properly.
I had four cores, but Tableu 8.3 was single-threaded. Tableau froze once in a fortnight, and without saving either *.tde or *.twb, they lost their sync.

I used and liked the documentation and user forum very much, and found there either a solution, a workaround or at least an explanation to my problems.

Initial setup was easy.

• We bought official basic and advanced Tableau trainings.
• My local Tableau instances (on my desktop and AWS instances) were installed by me.
• The central Tableau server was installed by the BI and administrator teams.

For a large company, the ROI is really fast.

Always buying the latest Tableau Desktop Professional is too expensive for an individual analyst/developer.

My team evaluated 50 visual analysis tools in 2014. I also was one of the key developers of Cygron Datascope.

Tableau was selected because it is the common platform for both data analysts and regular users. Both groups can use it. Of course, analysts can utilize more advanced techniques, but even an average user can understand charts and do basic things after 60 minutes of training.

Go for it. It is an excellent product for the majority of analyses. However, for complex reports and decision support cases, custom application development might be needed.

• Easy interaction with data
• Variety of visualizations possible
• Integration with R and Alteryx

We do a lot of work for our clients helping them understand the impact of marketing campaigns on their business results. Tableau helps us tell stories with data.

It helps us shorten the interval between raw data and actionable insight. We used it to standardize basic tracking and optimization functions for our digital media campaigns. We’re also developing a broader analytics practice, diving into the impact of on-line and off-line media combined.

There is a pretty steep learning curve, the product would be better if it were somehow more intuitive to use.

I’ve been using Tableau for about three years.

We have a small number of licenses with one Tableau server; we haven’t had any deployment, stability or scalability issues yet.

Generally, technical support is very good; responsive with generally effective solutions.

We primarily used Excel prior to Tableau. We are aware of some of the others, but for us, it is not worth investing the time re-inventing our process.

Initial setup went well; straightforward to install and get started. Takes a while to master the basics.

Implemented in-house. It would be helpful to have someone with a year of Tableau experience on staff to speed ramp up.

ROI is difficult to estimate as a lot of our use case revolves around streamlining internal processes / analysis. We are now providing analytic solutions to clients where we price on our hours, plus pass through costs for seats on the Tableau Server and a monthly maintenance fee. As we scale this up, we expect to drive profitable revenue through our analytics products.

It makes sense to implement it in tandem with Alteryx. Use Alteryx to clean / prep data, and then visualize in Tableau. Tableau is not the place to try to clean / join data.

• Visualization
• Data capacity

Where I'm working, we have many reports developed in Microsoft Excel to present results about the business. However, when we need to work a large volume of data, they are developed in Tableau because access to data from Oracle and managing large data volumes is easier than Excel. All the reports that we develop using Tableau are complimented by our directors, as the information is visualized well.

When we need to work with a large volume of data, we can create an extraction, validate data easily, and then present it to our users using Tableau Server or Tableau Reader.

I have difficulty working with many filters on the dashboards, and I'd like to see more options in the "Histories" section. QlikView makes better use of the dashboard filters.

We've used it for two years.

In some departments we chose to install Tableau Reader, but it's necessary to create a ticket to update the software for each new version. This process is not good as it disrupts our day-to-day functions.

I work with 4GB RAM and rarely I have a problem with it. My OS is 32 bits.

We've had no issues with scalability.

I always take support from Tableau's forums and communities.

We also looked at QlikView.

It's a great solution to present data, and our directors love to work with it.