Tableau Reviews

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.

Included data engine, work interface.

Include new graph views in Tableau, increase dual axis - sync of only two axis isn't enough.

1 year

No, but I have no experience in Tableau Server deployment

Yes, in v8.1 there was a problem with changing bg color of sheets and dashboards (TD shutdown)

In v8.1 there was a problem with big Excel files - for ex: if you have an Excel spreadsheet with three sheets and more then 300,000 rows in each one and you want to add it as one datasource linked by one key field - your Tableau Desktop will be very slowly.

Customer Service: 3 out of 5Technical Support: 4 out of 5

QlikView and Microsoft. Switched because there aren't any cubs, user friendly interface and lower cost.

Initial setup very easy but I did not setup Tableau Server

It was in-house

Only license fee and electricity:)

It's a nice solution, the vendor should listen to users and customers.

Tableau has many good features. It is user-friendly, has a simple-to-use interface, and has a customizable dashboard.

When you create new fields in Tableau and you enter the formulas, there is a new small window that is there in the interface. You can enter the calculated fields, it could be more user-friendly. At this time it is limited and hard to understand at the beginning. The fields should be easier to use, such as in Microsoft Excel. You can have a difficult time understanding what to do in the fields, you end up doing trial and error to figure it out.

I have been using Tableau for approximately seven years.

Tableau has a good online community that I used for support hat is very good.

The initial setup of Tableau is relatively simple. For new users of the solution, it is easy for them to grasp. You need to understand how to connect to the Oracle or SQL Server, having knowledge of databases will make the process easier.

The licensing model of Tableau has changed since we initially purchased it three years ago and it is more complicated, and I have found it to be more expensive. They have lost market shares to Microsoft BI. My company will probably change solutions this year because of the increased pricing model.

I have evaluated Microsoft BI.

My advice to others that are wanting to implement this solution is for them to use use the online community. There are many good resources, and examples for implementing solutions. There is plenty of support.

I rate Tableau a nine out of ten.

The solution is primarily used for analysis purposes. I use it quite a lot. 

Overall, the solution is pretty good.

You can do a lot of filtering from the dashboard. 

You are able to see and follow trends.

The scalability of the solution is very good.

There is a lot more that can be done with Tableau than what is actually happening within Juniper. The company is not getting the answers to the questions directly from the Tableau database, for example. Of course, Tableau can be extended to answer those questions. 

What is happening, with so many tools coming up in the market, is that people have to continuously get educated in order to use some of the more advanced features. What's happening with Tableau is that, except for the dashboard view and all the filtering and that's happening from a dashboard perspective, it doesn't seem to be very good in making me understand the trend insights. For example, if I saw that the average sales price for Product A was lower than the average sales price for Product B, I'm not saying that B is inferior to A or anything. I'm just noting what I found and I cannot give more details. It doesn't go deeper into the analysis. I'd like more analysis to better understand what a trend might mean, and not just a report that a trend is happening. Right now, Tableau is not so good at providing that extra bit of insight.

What happens is Tableau data is used very often. From the quarterly business reviews, et cetera, the executives have direct access to the Tableau dashboard. More than anything else, they're able to do all this filtering. They could probably improve the user interface response times. When it comes to slicing and dicing of data viewing the results, it needs to be just easier in general as executives are using it and looking at it, and they are not very technical. 

When executives look at the Tableau dashboard, they want to know why, for example, Product A bringing in less than Product B. Those kinds of key questions, which come from executives for reviewing the Tableau data need to be addressed and in a simple to understand way. I think Tableau has to work a little more in terms of the business insights aspect of it, where it communicates to the user and answers their questions. That intelligence part needs to be developed in Tableau. 

Something great would be, if, for example, like in Google, if you asked a question, it could feed you back potential information. I don't want to compare everything to Google, however, it's so easy to find the answers you need in the way Google is set up. If Tableau could do something similar to showcase answers to questions, that would be ideal. It needs some sort of smart dashboard. 

I've found the scalability to be quite good. If a user needs to expand it, they can do so. 

I also have used Teradata previously. 

The front-end of Teradata is not so well used and therefore I cannot talk about it much, however, the dashboard is pretty good. Much like Google, which uses ML and AI to help answer questions, both solutions could benefit from extracting intelligence to answer questions. 

I'm simply an end-user of the product. I don't have a business relationship with Tableau.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. I'd like to talk to a Tableau product manager about the solution and describe how I would like the solution to work, especially around deeper analysis.