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.

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.

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.  

I have a lot of experience using Tableau for the Healthcare Market. I use Tableau for visualization and reporting mostly. Main observations:

• Tableau is nice and smooth. 
• Tableau is quite user-friendly and easy to use. 
• The digital agents were really great. 
• Clients and customers liked the visualizations. 

Overall, I got positive feedback from clients by using Tableau.

I work for clients. That is my business model. Business people really like to see Tableau. They love Tableau because it is very user-friendly. The platform provides an easy to use interface, which is what most people like about it. 

Being easy to use is more important to me than the look and feel Tableau gives to your data. Nevertheless, data analytics is what we value the most. 

Tableau definitely has a big user community. If you get stuck or anything, you can easily seek help through that. Whenever you do this, you get good results.

The diagram drop facilities help to double up hard drive reports. The map facilities and the ability to connect with different data sources are the most valuable features. 

Tableau has a lot of different connectors, many of which are very new. You can connect many different data sources with Tableau. 

Overall, it was a good experience with Tableau and the visualization looks quite attractive with the proper combination of colors.

I have a lot of experience on the desktop version of Tableau. My recommendations for improvement for Tableau would be:

1. From the developer perspective, the data connection handling the target data set is what most needs to be improved. 
2. Tableau keeps evolving with each version. With Tableau 192019.2, they're coming again with some more features. 
3. Data preparation is where Tableau needs to work a lot on. Every time with Tableau you have to invest a lot of time preparing the data before you start using the visualizations.
4. Tableau doesn't perform well on big data processes. Suppose I was working with a file of like 1 or 2 gigabytes, then in that case Tableau is really slow. 

Sometimes I feel that Tableau is too slow when you have a big data file.

It's quite stable, aside from the data file which is not. Otherwise, Tableau doesn't hang.

Good scalability. Not that bad, not that great, it's good.

I didn't need technical support with Tableau.

We don't have any preference for other solutions. We depend on Tableau for the solutions based on the client's requirement. If a client requires Tableau, we develop the application and customize it.

A lot of complexity happens initially. Tableau is a little bit too complex. I started using the clear tool and application. Then you will feel comfortable with the tool and with the data. 

There will definitely be some tough, complex things in your development, especially with the data. The data preparation (combining everything else) has to work. 

Initially, all the data preparation tools have that kind of experience. In the beginning, you have some tough times and little complexity. Once you resolve this, the future and further development will come relatively easy.

First, clients should be comfortable with the existing resources or existing platform which the organization is using - that is one of the very important aspects before you decide on any new tool or any kind of new technology. 

Second, you want to go ahead and invite a new application into your current system. Ask how compatible the application is before you decide on any new product in your organization.

Third, you should consider if your employees are comfortable with the new incoming technology in terms of whether it’s easy to learn or adapt. Ask how comfortable your employees are before you bring any new tool into your organization

These are the key important points. I will rate Tableau at eight out of ten because there will be some shortcomings in the application that are not up to the mark.

• 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.

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

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.

For visual data analysis, discovery analysis and usability, it is the best product on the market.

For data cleaning, it can be very helpful in showing you where there are holes or mistakes in your data.

In our Project Management office, it has provided us better insight into the breadth of our work and made it much easier to see which projects are at risk. Once we retire our old reporting system (Word docs/PowerPoint), we will be saving about 20 people four hours per week. You can do the math on the annual impact.

Getting buy-in from all of the department leaders has been the toughest part. They are tentative about letting go of the old systems, we have to really prove that our Tableau dashboards fully meet their needs.

This is tough to answer. The company puts more $$ into R&D than any other in the industry and I don't even use all of its current abilities. They put out releases regularly, so at this point this is more about keeping up with the changes and understanding how they are useful to us.

The tool was not created for data structuring, but does provide some functionality.

I have been using it for about 15 months, off and on, at times more than others. I use it on any piece of analysis I can.

We were unable to use LDAP or Active Directory, so all server users have to be created locally. Stability and scalability are not issues; we are just trying to grow adoption. Of course, we have experienced some growing pains but that is normal with any new technology.

Customer support always gets back to me within 24 hours. However, they are not always able to help me resolve my issue.

We have the EBI tool, Oracle OBIEE. Although I never used it personally, our department has experience with several of the top competitors of this product. Despite owning licenses to those tools and using them, the decision was made that Tableau offers self-serve BI better than any of the others. (I was not a part of this decision process, but was moved over from another team to manage the product once the decision was made.)

Initial setup was straightforward. One thing Tableau excels at is documentation that is user friendly. We did bring in a consultant to help this go smoothly but honestly I think he did more harm than good. Could have just followed the playbook.

Implementation was done by a vendor team and in-house. Our middleware team did the heavy lifting and we brought in a vendor team with experience to help us.

ROI has yet to be determined as the implementation is less than a year old. Adoption has been slower than expected but gaining momentum lately. I attribute the slower adoption to the fact that using Tableau is a shift in thinking for those wanting to use it and therefore involves some growing pains that some are hesitant to embrace. However, those that have embraced it are beginning to reap the benefits.

The pricing is a little steep. However, if used correctly, the improvements in productivity will more than outweigh the cost.

It does require you to think about your data in a slightly different way as this is totally different than Excel, so take a little extra time when starting out.

Tableau helps people see and understand their data, answering valuable business questions and giving insight into mountains of information collected over time.

We use Tableau for the analytic dashboards.

Tableau as a BI solution provides a platform to develop user-friendly, story telling dashboards, which provide insights to help management take decisions.

The solution has a lot of customization when comparing to Microsoft BI.

The customization requires a lot of effort and should be simplified. The performance could be better. When comparing the performance of Tableau to other solutions, such as Microsoft BI, they are not as good.

I have been using Tableau for approximately four years.

The stability is very good.

Tableau has good scaling capabilities.

We have approximately 30 to 40 users using this solution in my organization.

The support is good for Tableau. However, if we ask for a certain feature they will not entertain us, unless other customers are also asking for the same feature.

Positive

We previously were using Microsoft BI and we switched to Tableau because of the increased level of customization it provides.

The installation is complicated and took us approximately four hours.

It would be best to use an integrator or other professional assistance for the implementation.

We have approximately two engineers that handle the maintenance of the solution.

Our management can take decisions based on insights provided by Tableau, which are smart and help us reduce costs and data issues.

There is a license for the use of this solution and it is on a per-user basis. The server is free but the users you have to pay for.

We performed a POC before going with Tableau, we tried Power BI because Power BI is competing against tableau. But to use Power BI at its full potential, you need the Power BI cloud edition, which our organization cannot go with. So the obvious choice was to go with Tableau.

Tableau is very good, but customers have to understand the requirements of hardware and software the way Tableau works. If they have some requirements that Tableau cannot meet, they will understand how to do it in an alternate way.

I rate Tableau an eight out of ten.

We can do many things with Tableau. I only use it for simple cases, but you can do many things with the device.

Tableau makes changes frequently. Any feature I am looking for usually is part of the next upgrade within a few months. They have a very good dynamic evolution.

The user story model is the most deceptive part of Tableau. It is a big marketing option, however, the reality is that it is not enough.

I have been using Tableau for two years.

Tableau is a good product. 

The advice I would give to someone looking to use Tableau would be to get prepared.

I use Tableau for BI and business subject, I would rate it a 9 out of 10.

Tableau is good for routine dashboards, and it has integration with Slack, through which it can send you daily updates.

Areas for improvement would be visualization and augmented analytics. In the next release, I would like to see automated insights from the data added to the dashboard.

I've been using this solution for about six years.

Tableau can be a little slow when loading, and it can fail with higher gigs or terabytes of data.

From working with my data analyst, I get the impression that Tableau can't take the load when scaling.

We had embedded technical support from Tableau in our enterprise, who was awesome and kept Tableau updated at all times.

Tableau is pretty good, interface-wise - it's easy to understand and to download data. It also has the most functionalities and capabilities of any tool. However, it doesn't have anything that differentiates it from its competitors, unlike Adobe Analytics' strength in visualization and data capture. If someone is looking for routine dashboards and wants operational dashboards, Tableau is the best solution. However, if they want to drive strategic decisions, they may have to look into a different product. I would rate Tableau as seven out of ten.