Tableau Reviews

We use Tableau for BI reporting.

The most valuable feature is the interface, which is user-friendly and intuitive. Even for somebody new, who has no idea of how a BI tool is supposed to function from a technical standpoint, it is very intuitive. You simply import the data and then use the drag-and-drop capabilities.

Data cleansing and data transformation functionality need to be improved. Tableau is not a full-stack BI tool, like Sisense. Including this type of functionality would add flavor to the tool.

The main point is that Tableau requires the data to be in a certain format for the end-user, in order for them to create charts. If it's not in a certain format, or in a certain structure, then the user will have to manipulate it.

The charts in Tableau are quite limited.

I have been using Tableau for a few years.

Tableau caters to a lot of databases and flat files, which means that you can connect to multiple data sources. In this regard, I would say that it is quite scalable.

We have between 40 and 50 users in the company.

We are quite satisfied with community support. It is always there if you need any help and I am pretty happy with it.

I have worked with other BI tools including Spotfire and Power BI. There are not as visually appealing as Tableau and I would stay that purely from the UI perspective, Tableau definitely has the upper hand.

Conversely, Power BI has some capabilities that are missing in Tableau. Examples of this are charts and graphs. If you want to create something that's customizable, it's a very difficult and tedious task in Tableau. This is unlike Power BI or Sisense. 

The initial setup is very easy. Once you download it, it is a typical setup with a series of screens where you just press the Next button. Anybody can install it in a few minutes.

I am currently researching Sisense to get an idea of what the pros and cons of the different BI tools are. Sisense is a more complete tool that includes data cleaning, data transformation, and ETL capabilities right in the tool.

Tableau, on the other hand, is used for visualizations, dashboards, and storytelling. Their data has been cleaned or preprocessed in an SQL database beforehand.

Tableau is a product that I recommend.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

On-premises

We have used it for our program correspondence, basically, so how to program report to satisfaction of different programs. It helps us obtain information. We also use it for visualization.

It allows us to basically understand and evaluate our numbers in an expedient manner. It doesn't require us to need a huge number of data bases that we need to manage. This solution sets everything up for us. It has a good ease-of-use.

In the past, we were using several different solutions, and the packages were insufficient for our needs. We used a lot of different software solutions, and extreme Excel, but it wasn't enough for our needs. We were also looking for something that was a bit more user-friendly. 

One of the most valuable features are the different visualizations. It makes it much easier for us to represent what the data is showing. The dashboard is great, and the visualizations are really what we focus on. 

It's as powerful if you know how to use it, so it's made as much as we know how to use it. It's enough, but there's much more of a need to understand what you do to operate the solution. To be able to do more, we need to set it up to do different things. It is fine, but we have not really invested time or people into doing this much.

I would like to be able to set the parameters in a more specific manner. I feel as if it's not a questions of whether the solution is sufficient, it's whether we understand how to use it to the best of its productivity.

One to three years.

It is a stable solution. I think we can use it for a while for a lot of different things. Again, we do not know the full scope of the capabilities. I think we are using it the best we can, but we could find better ways for it to best suit our needs. So, we just need to learn how to use it more efficiently.

The technical support is good. They give solutions to our questions. 

We previously used Microsoft BI.

I was not involved in the initial setup of the solution.

Most people buy software because they know that it will help them do one thing, but they use it a tenth of the potential of what it could be used for. So, if you don't know what that is, you're stuck at ten percent. Be sure to explore the full capabilities of the solution.

The price is competitive. We always consider pricing when considering a new solution. We are a non-profit, and pricing is a huge concern.

We always like to evaluate other products in tandem with what we are using.

When reviewing a possible solution, we always consider:

• Price
• Functionality

There are many and various use cases. Some use it internally for inter-department analytics, sales analytics, campaign management, and sentiment analysis.

The most valuable feature is the richness of its visualization and from a self-service standpoint, the ease of use.

The interface is fine. The functionality in the UI front is good as well.

It integrates easily.

From a UI visualization standpoint, I think it's pretty robust.

The data processing in Tableau is pathetic compared to Qlik.

In Qlik, I can replace my ELD layer for an application. This can't be done in Tableau.

The initial processing of data in Tableau takes a lot of effort.

If there could be a feature that a particular visual can be exported or just the data behind the particular visual can be exported in one single click, just one button on a visual and it exports the relevant data out to Excel or a CSV output, that would be good.

I have been using Tableau since 2014, maybe even before that.

It's pretty stable.

It's decently scalable. I have been able to scale it pretty easily.

Technical support is good. On a scale of five, I would say four.

The initial setup is neither straightforward nor complex.

Pricing is not bad. It's competitive.

I'm a BI Architect.

My recommendation for this solution would depend on the use cases.

I would rate Tableau and eight out of ten.

Hybrid Cloud

We use this business intelligence tool to build dashboards to display some of the statistical and analytical information that our company gathers. We develop a precision medicine software platform that enables academic and community healthcare providers to implement and scale precision medicine programming. We capture clinical data, genomic and other molecular data, biomedical knowledge, and the relationships among them. We also provide integrated complex genomic and clinical data to clinicians with actionable insights. 

Previously, we built the dashboards manually but this practice proved to be inefficient and ineffective since it meant we spent a lot of time debugging. It's was hard to find developers capable of doing that kind of work at scale. Since the Tableau community user base is so big and a lot of people can use it; the widespread support is one of the biggest benefits. Besides that, it's a fantastic framework to build dashboards and innovative visualizations.

One of the most valuable features is that the solution allows users to build interactive dashboards. This allows the end user to modify the criteria or the filtering if need be.

As far as for my personal use as a QA Engineer, I really value how extensive their API document support has been.

Improvements can be made in template support. The workbook file structure is really hard to version control. If there was some sort of version control support offered particularly for workbooks, that would help big time.

Another note is that the interactions within the UI are not fast enough and in certain instances, there have been issues with the intuitiveness of the tool. Such as delays in configuring and achieving some specific effects. 

I have to say Tableau does have excellent and extensive online support.

One to three years.

The solution is stable. I've never had any problems.

My impressions of the scalability of this solution are that there are ways to make it as scalable as you want. There have been some issues with the amount of the data that we had to use on the platform. We ended up using the extracts. It works fine now. I would say it is scalable.

I haven't contacted their live support or emailed them. Their documentation is fairly extensive and we also had a training session conducted by one of their partner companies. It was the Tableau Accelerated Course and that helped a lot.

The initial setup was straightforward with respect to the deployment. 

Tableau provides a UI which can be used to build a clear graphical visualization that allows quick and easy data comprehension. This functionality really helps turn data into scalable insights. This makes things a lot easier for people who don't have coding experience and with dedicated people focused on managing the visualizations, not requiring them all to be developers or to have any coding experience is a real plus.

If I was to give this solution a rating from one-to-ten, ten is the best, I'd rate it a 9 because it does all that we require of it and more. I would recommend this solution to my colleagues from another company. It's a nice tool to work with.  

• Data Interpreter: Which can identify issues or potential errors with your imported data.
• Split: When you need to split columns.
• Pivot: Good for changing date columns.
• Metadata: This selection can clean up field names, especially after a pivot.

• Data Interpreter: Can rid your data of null value fields.
• Split: Click on the column you want to split, identify how you want to split it, and where you want to split the data.
• Pivot: Great when you have many columns of dates. Just highlight your date columns, then right click and select Pivot. That's it. Now, your totals and region data will be based on any particular year.
• Metadata: You can select the second icon above your previewed data source. You can select the dropdown arrow for each Field Name you would like to change and you can split the names here as well, or double click on the Pivot name and correct the name where it makes more sense for the type of data you are using. You can create alias names as well.

Tableau is always good at improving, but I typically get so busy with utilizing what is there, I have not had any needs yet for improvement.

More recently in the past few months.

No deployment issues.

No stability issues.

No scalability issues.

Customer Service:

I have not had to use customer service for Tableau. I just go online and google my needs typically.

Technical Support:

I have not had to use technical support for Tableau yet. As with customer service, I just go online and google my needs typically.

I really like the user-friendly (usability, user experience) layout of Tableau. The visual layout for me is very appealing.

It is really straightforward, but I can see if someone has issues with the download and setup, you may want to contact technical support.

Implementation was in-house on my own. It was easy.

I have not measured this, but the time saved by allowing the tool to make the necessary changes instead of going back to the spreadsheet is definitely worth my time and the company's money.

Not sure about this, except that Tableau can be costly (but this can be indefinable, such as user experience vs. cheaper etc.)

Again, this was more based on learning curve and user experience for me. I've worked with MicroStrategy and BusinessObjects (learning curve is higher for me for these, then Tableau). Big thing here is the user experience for less savvy or non-technical people (from my experience). I'm sure MSTR and BO are good tools, just not my preference.

As I had mentioned above in regards to improvements, I believe every tool or application or databases for that matter can always use improvement. That's why we work in the field of data and/or IT, it's ever changing and improving, so we need to change and improve as well. Keep abreast of new things in the market and the improvements of the tools or apps you use on a daily basis. The last thing we want in our industry is to become complacent. Then again, we should never become complacent in any facets of our lives.

Geo Spatial maps and Time Series animation with Storyboarding. The easy to use interface has really accelerated adoption. 

It lets power users like engineers create visuals on their data without waiting on a longer IT project timeline. The downside is you really need some SQL skills to take full advantage of it.

For Tableau, R is just a script interface. It is missing the R-style Plot area the data scientists want to use. They really want to overlay pieces on the plot and derive new graphs.

They need to provide a Folder hierarchy for organizing content and setting security. Creating 900 sites takes way too much work and limiting. As a result, we have hundreds of Worksheets in one long list—not good.

We had no issues with the deployment.

Performance has issues when you get too many users. The latest upgrade made it worse and had to be backed off.

The above issues brings into question how scalable it really is.

I am most familiar with SAP Business Objects Web Intelligence, but have been to classes on Tableau, Power BI, and Qlikview as part of our internal efforts to help the business choose which is right for their needs.

R and SAS are under our heading of Advanced Analytic tools in the BI space and will be evaluated in phase 2.

Plan how you need to organize and secure content up front. It’s too much work later when it becomes popular. Be sure to plan and budget for more client license bundle purchases as user growth approaches critical mass. Otherwise, you’ll be putting them on a wait list and waiting for management to approve more spending. Managing a lack of licenses is not fun.

Ease of use. The power to do anything I want to do. The ability to connect to any data. The ability to merge ("Blend" data from multiple sources). Built in "best practices" in data visualization. Statistical capabilities with the "R" integration.

I'm a consultant - specializing in Tableau. It allows me to go into a client and be productive immediately. Also, it's ease of use helps me get in the doors, initially - I can walk in, connect to a client's real data, and find insights from that data, in a 30 minute meeting.

Everytime I make a request for a new feature, it is, typically, in the next release. I would like to see some additional calculation functions - maybe some statistical one for clients that do not want to have to learn R. As in every product, there are things it does not do, but, I've never had a user need I could not meet.

I started with Tableau Desktop in 2005. At that time I had been using Brio Query, Cognos, and some others. Once I saw Tableau, talked to the founders and heard where they were going, I started leaning toward Tableau & I've never looked back!

I've had no deployment issues. With some clients that have "specialized/custom designed environments", it may take a few minutes/hours longer to get everything running, but, Tableau Support has always been there for me.

I have had a couple crashes - usually linked back to something stupid I did in my Windows machine. I've done some work with the latest Mac version - have had no issues, in it...

Never. I do a BILLION+ record demo on my notebook, with sub-second response time. As in any other tool/application, proper design is still needed. Tableau affords me the advantage of being able to implement increment aggregate data sets without having IT involvement. THAT is BIG!

Customer Service: Excellent - best Customer Service in the industry, from my experience. I've never had a question or issue where I did not feel like I was their top priority...Technical Support: They suffered some growing pains, for a while. But, they seem to have implemented processes and procedures that aid in the support function. Right now, I rate them as excellent.

I was a Cognos and a Brio user / developer. Every update became more fragmented and harder to use - always seemed to be from acquisition, not smart & integrated, development. As an experienced BI consultant, I saw that Tableau's direction was where they all should have been going. Switching was the smartest business decision I ever made!

Server and Desktop install the same way. Double-click on the installer program - click "Next" a few times. Done. You can customize the Server installation, along the way. in many cases, that is not needed. The whole process is easy and fast. Desktop installs in a minute. Initial Server installation can take 10 minutes.

I've always done my own Tableau installations and upgrades - too easy to think about paying someone. There are consulting companies, that specialize in Tableau, for businesses that have too few resources, or, might have a complex environment. For the most part, Tableau Support can help with installation issues. Once set up, I advise clients to work with experienced consultants, for a short period of time, to set up a "production process".

As an independent consultant, I have no "projects" of my own. Two comments, 1. My entire income from consulting is based on my Tableau knowledge. In that sense, my ROI is an infinite percent. 2. I've seen clients find actionable insights so fast, and with so much bottom line impact, that the cost of implementing an enterprise environment was paid for, up front, from a two week trial copy of Tableau Desktop.

Tableau Desktop is $1999 per named user (Professional version). There are no add-on fees. Mapping, census demographics, R interface, ALL data connectors - are all included... From my perspective, and from my client's perspectives, the pricing model is ideal. You get it ALL for one price - no issues after the fact...

Yes & no. No real "project" to review where I was going. Many times, the client dictates what I would be using. As I developed into more a higher level consultant, I was always looking at new products, and updates from existing ones. In the last nine years, no one has come close to unseating Tableau as my choice...

Start NOW, In the free, full offering trial (2 weeks), coupled with the free on-demand training and passionate & active user community, you will be amazed at what you can accomplish. Many find they PAY for it, BEFORE they buy it! If you need help, there is Tableau Support, Tableau Consulting and a bunch of us in the independent world, all ready to assist.