Tableau Reviews

The feature which I value the most about Tableau is its ability to plot nonstandard charts/graphs, such as coxcomb, streamgraph, chord, sankey, and hexbin charts, etc. The map feature is cool, too. For now, it can integrate with Mapbox and other WMS services. I wish in the future there were more choices.

Unlike most of products which have a limited period for trial use, Tableau Public is free, and because of that, our team is able to hold a regular workshop, in which each team member can have chances to share of what he/she learned from using the tool.

I think dashboard and story can still improve. For example, the placement of sheets on dashboard are quite tedious work, especially when the page is long. The automation of adjusting size of sheets has given us a hard time to place sheets neatly on the dashboard, even though the intention is good. As for story, just wish there could be more templates.

Two to three years.

I think Tableau is quite stable, but it is likely to be an effect from another service, such as Web Map Service. Whenever there’s problem with the WMS, Tableau hangs with it.

Not yet.

Fairly good, since there are lots of forums and tutorials on the web which you can find.

We used IBM Cognos back then, but it’s really not easy to use and since it’s an integration of variety of services, it’s quite confusing sometimes. Plus it required training lessons, which aren’t cheap at all.

The initial setup is straightforward and easy.

I think Tableau could try to have different types of pricing and licensing packages, since there are a variety of users with different needs. For example, some users prefer to buy a license for one time only and use the service without upgrade for a long period of time, but some prefer monthly subscriptions.

Besides Cognos, we also evaluated Power BI, SAP Lumira, Pentaho, OBIEE, BO, Spago, etc., but most of them are either too expensive, lack functionality, have limited usage of charts, are hard to use and unfriendly.

It’s really an A+ product. Other than being a customer, we also suggest to our clients this product.

Tableau's strength is visualization. If a report/dashboard is presented in visualization, the end user can easily connect with the data compared to a tabular format.

We created a dashboard that displays booking and shipping orders with month-to-date rolling. Executives get a better understanding of the organization as soon as they open this dashboard everyday.

There is lot of improvement needed on Tableau extracts. Right now, Tableau doesn't support updating extracts with only changed records. We are doing full extracts everyday, which is utilizing a lot of resources.

More than two years.

No.

We are limited with the Tableau extract functionality, which is causing an overburden on resources.

Technical support is very helpful and prompt on their service, a very knowledgeable support team.

No.

Follow the documentation provided. It is a very straightforward setup.

If the user base is huge, try getting enterprise level licenses. If not, you can get desktop licenses for power users.

Evaluated a few options: QlickView and OBIEE.

First try a proof of concept with one data set using Tableau. Present it to the user community. Try to work with an implementation partner. Training is essential for power users.

Desktop – primarily ease of use, TTM, for ad-hoc and reusable analyses and visualizations.

Primarily TTM. The product is used by a number of different groups throughout the company – marketing, services, product engineering...

Server scalability and pricing. Tableau was considered but rejected for a large scale in-house analysis and reporting solution. Even with a large-scale implementation (eight-plus cores), it was decided that Tableau probably wouldn’t scale to the level needed and at that level, was costly.

Desktop was brought into the company five or six years back. Server instances soon followed to support smaller groups.

Desktop installation is easy and straightforward. Out-of-the-box usable.

We have a central IT group that handled server deployments and now handles corporate-wide desktop license maintenance and support with the vendor.

The desktop is fairly intuitive and easy to get started with. Training (on the product, data viz/scientist) is needed for deeper analyses.

As with any solution, do your homework. Understand what it is you’re trying to solve. Tableau is just one of many tools/solutions implemented across the company.

We are a consultant, and it is our main product for consultancy.

It is deployed on the cloud as well as on-premises.

It is so easy to do a lot of things. There is a lot of flexibility and creativity in this product. In other products, you don't have this flexibility.

I would like Tableau Prep to be integrated with Tableau Desktop. I would also like more customizations for tables.

Its setup should be simple. It is complex to deploy if you work in a test environment.

I have been using this solution for four years.

It is stable.

It is easy to scale. It is suitable for small, medium, and large enterprise

Their technical support is great.

It is complex. If you work in a test environment, it is complex to deploy. It should be more simple. You need someone who can help you with deployment.

It is reasonable based on what it offers.

I would advise following Tableau Blueprint in your deployment. There are guidelines that will help you.

I would rate it a nine out of 10.

I primarily use the solution in order to utilize the graphs. It offers a good diversity of graphs and I can manage different data sets together with Excel. I can publish it for my manager, if, in the future, I'm going to use it at work. 

The solution offers good capabilities in terms of responding to my requirements. My dataset is so small and I don't need any complex graphs. It makes it very simple.

The solution is very stable.

The initial setup is quick and easy and you don't need special outside assistance to set everything up.

The integration with other program languages, like Python, needs to be better. I know the capability is there, however, there needs to be better integration. There needs to be integration for machine learning and AI. That would help data analysts and data scientists quite a bit.

I've only been using the solution for a few weeks at this point. I'm working on gaining some experience and familiarity with the product.

I've found the solution to be quite stable and reliable so far. I haven't used it long, however, I can't recall it crashing or freezing. I haven't experienced bugs or glitches. Its performance is good.

There might be about 20 people in our organization that use the solution.

I'm not sure if we will continue to use the product. Currently, I've only used it for a few weeks, and I'm learning it. However, our organization seems to like to work with Oracle. I'm not sure if we will focus on that or not in the future.

I've never used Oracle's technical support in the past. I can't speak to how well they help users with issues or how fast they respond.

I've worked a bit more with Power BI.

Our organization also works with Oracle's Analytics.

The installation was very, very easy. I didn't have any issues at all. It wasn't complex.

The deployment took less than 15 minutes. It was very fast and seamless.

I handled the implementation myself. I only had to download it onto my own PC.

Our company hasn't yet made a decision on the product in terms of long-term usage. I'm not sure what the licensing status is at this point.

We're just potential customers and end-users of the product. We don't have a business relationship with Tableau. I'm very new to the product and still really just testing it out to see how I could potentially work with it in the future.

I'm working with the latest version of the solution.

Overall, in my short time using the product, I've been largely happy with the results. I'd rate the product at an eight out of ten.

• Analytics
• Dashboarding
• Presentation
• Reporting

• Transitioned from static to dynamic reporting
• Transitioned from restricted to flexible visualizations

• Scheduling the reports as email to multiple users on daily basis preferably in Excel without creating user accounts for each user
  Establishing an effective connection from SAP BO universe to Tableau

I have used it for 3+ years.

I have not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues. I recommend filtering data at the source itself instead of bringing data into the tool and then applying filters.

Technical support is excellent. I hope they continue doing the same.

We previously used another solution. We switched to Tableau because, in my opinion, it has some of the best features available. It will take five years for other tools to catch up to where Tableau is right now.

Initial setup complexity was due to the organization's data structure, but it had nothing to do with the tool.

Implementation was in-house; we read through the guide.

It is expensive but worth it. I would prefer a lower license cost or an increase in the allowed # of users per license.

Buy it, implement it and stick with it for a sure and quick ROI.

The most valuable features of this product are:

• Easy-to-create dashboard
• Friendly user interface
• ShowMe
• Database connections

Users can generate reports by themselves, while IT people can focus on the database management.

It significantly reduced the time to prepare reports, from three days to three hours.

Add ETL function; add 3D graphics; add a keep-only filter because it is difficult to revert to the original data format; add more ShowMe options; include AI function.

I have used this solution for two years.

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

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

We evaluated Microsoft Excel and IBM Cognos: they are more time consuming, less efficient for generating reports, and more expensive.

Initial setup is straightforward, consisting of simple procedures for database connections and desktop setup.

An in-house team implemented it using self-learning materials.

Desktop Pro is US$ 1,999 each.

Define the main purpose of using Tableau, and in which aspects.

If you want the most beautiful dashboards, Tableau is the answer. If you want to shift your dashboarding/analysis development to your users, Tableau seems to be the best choice, as for the most part it’s quite easy to use.

It offers beautiful visualizations on the fly. New users will catch on to it quite fast for doing simple analysis. Creating complex objects can sometimes get quite tricky, but most of the things can be done very simply and quite faster compared to QlikView.

Tableau is moving fast. In fact, we see it as a leader in the data visualization market. We would like to see improvements in its enterprise capabilities.

It offers the Tableau server for deploying apps that can be shared and used by multiple users, but it needs further improvement to be able to support a large set of users in a big organization.

If you are planning to implement self-service BI in your organization, I see Tableau as the best fit, but you will need to find a good tool for ETL.

Also, if you are required to develop financial reports etc., Tableau might not help you much.

Nonetheless, you can run a Tableau solution without needing a lot of IT involvement.

Tableau needs some improvement in its organization-wide deployment capabilities.

Qlik Sense (a new tool by Qlik) tries to be like Tableau, but if you want something like Tableau, you better go for Tableau.