Tableau Room for Improvement

ROMIL SHAH - PeerSpot reviewer
Deputy General Manger - Information Technology at Nayara Energy

When it comes to visualizations, Tableau has a limitation as compared to Power BI. It has a limited set of visualizations. Power BI has the entire marketplace, so you can connect and import many visualizations and use them, whereas Tableau has only 10 or 15 visualizations. There should be more visualizations, and there should also be data integration with more cloud providers.

Tableau has recently launched a paid version for the documentation. So, documentation has become a little bit challenging when it comes to Tableau development because we do not have any tool to export the data out of it. It is a license-based feature that you need to purchase to prepare documentation. So, on the documentation front, for preparing clear documentation for any dashboard, it would help if we get an embedded option, rather than buying a license for each user for the documentation. To document anything, if I have to connect to each workbook and see what has been written as a formula and then document in the Word document, it is pretty time-consuming.

We have the Microsoft stack, and we are currently evaluating Power BI because Tableau has a limitation of 50 columns for a drill-down report. If we want more than 50 columns, we have found a hack, but there is no ready-made option for doing it. So, we have to use another tool in case we need a drilled report with more than 50 columns. There are many instances where users need 80 or 90 columns for their analysis, and switching between two technologies becomes a challenge. It is not a cost-effective approach for us.

Their support should be improved. We are not happy with their support. Whenever we raised queries, we were pointed to a few blogs, and we didn't get a proper solution from them.

Their licensing should also be improved. They want us to purchase a Tableau Creator license for business users, whereas Power BI Desktop is free for business users. They should come up with a basic license with one or two connectors that our business users can use for preparing their visualizations. Tableau also charges us per user for users who want the data only through email.

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TM
Senior Capacity Planner at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Its price is a concern. It is more expensive than Power BI. The other thing that I never liked about Tableau is its ability to handle large sets of data. To present the data in the dashboards, we have to stage it up exactly like it is going to come into the dashboard. We use another tool called Alteryx that does that for us. So, we manipulate the data, get it staged, and then push it into Tableau. Tableau is terrible at handling large data sets, and we knew right away that we couldn't use Tableau to do data manipulation.

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Amir Tolba - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Analyst at Educational Testing Service

More integration with Python or something related to machine learning would be a good improvement.

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Buyer's Guide
Tableau
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Tableau. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
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AP
Lead Business Analyst at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

Firstly, the high cost of Tableau licenses makes it inaccessible for many mid-scale clients. Secondly, the server requires at least 128GB of RAM, which can be impractical for some systems. We need a dedicated system to use Tableau. 

These are the two major challenges I see, especially for smaller organizations. Perhaps introducing lighter options or scaling solutions could be helpful.

Tableau offers some of the best features in the market. Enhancements are always ongoing, and it's already one of the strongest BI tools available.

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RD
Senior Manager.Marketing Strategy & Analysis. at a marketing services firm with 10,001+ employees

There is a lack of visualization in Tableau which could be improved. For example, if you want to do a Sankey in Tableau, you have to do a lot of work to do it. Sankeys are available, they are for sale for a minimum of $400, which is out of the question. Whereas if I wanted to do a Sankey, it is simple for me to use a free visualization and put in the data, and from what I already have, receive a fancy Sankey.

Whenever it comes to specialized visualization, Tableau is an absolute failure.

The integration between Tableau and our statistics software or other software, such as Python is very loose and undefined. If they improve that it would be a benefit.

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PS
Manager at Accenture

When you're working on a dashboard, you can't select multiple components at a time and align them, so you have to go one by one. This is very cumbersome if you're floating, and it loses in comparison to Power BI, which does allow multiple selections. In the next release, I would like to see an enhancement of the prescriptive analytics features.

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YA
Data Visualization Specialist at Data Catalyst

I attended a Tableau conference recently, and a quick improvement came to mind. When I am training people how to use it, I've come across situations where I've found it difficult to explain relationships. For example, when you want to blend data or when you want to show relationships, like when linking multiple tables; well, if you're an IT guy, that's easy. But if you are not an IT guy, you don't know anything about entity relationships, and it becomes a bit difficult for others to follow along.

It takes me a long time to get people to understand, even up to the point where I feel that this is the lowest level that I can go in terms of explaining it. I realized that many people don't really have any experience or knowledge about relationships between objects, and it makes it hard for me to get my teaching across. 

So I was suspecting, and I think I made this recommendation, that Tableau could find an easier way to introduce relationships. For now, if you want to build relationships in Tableau, or even in Excel, you have things like Access modules and Sheets. But how do I know that I need to use one object with another for the relationship. And if you then put in a table, what do you do after that? You have to double click, but people don't know that you have to double click.

I was hoping that there's a way that they can make that process a bit easier, though I don't know how they will do it. Perhaps when you load Tableau and connect to a data source, there would be a prompt that asks you if you want to link two tables together. So if you want to link two tables together, maybe you do A, B, C, D.

That might help with the self-service idea. If you're talking about self-service, then it should be easy for people who do not have the time, or who do not have that IT background, to pick the data and use it correctly.

In addition, and more generally, what I would like to see more support for is predictive analytics. When you're doing descriptive analysis, Tableau is excellent, and it's easy to do. But when you are trying to predict something, like in Tableau's forecasting feature, it seems to require date fields, or it won't work.

But I can forecast something without relying on date fields; maybe I want to predict that a branch has to close if it doesn't want to make something soon. I don't need dates to do that. For this reason, I'm using Alteryx for predictive modeling instead of Tableau.

Overall, the only major frustration that I have had so far is with Tableau Public. I first used Tableau Public when I was building capacity, and when there was a later release to download and you wanted to upgrade, all your work would have to be manually re-entered. I don't know how they can solve that. I was expecting that they might make a release on this upgrade, and then I can hit upgrade and it will install over what ever I have already.

Otherwise, for now I think they are doing well and I know they're still adding a lot of features. But it does sometimes make our work difficult, for those of us who are building capacity, and who are regularly changing people around. It means you have to keep learning all the time.

Another small detail for improvement is that when you draw bar charts, the default color could be something more neutral like gray. Instead, the default is blue, and I don't exactly get why this is the case.

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Roshan Jayakodi - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant - Data Engineering at South Asian Technologies

With Tableau, the only downside stems from its prices, especially in the country where I reside, which is Sri Lanka. When my company reaches out to new customers with Tableau's new costs, we find ourselves at a disadvantage. The price is an area where improvements are required.

I think Tableau plans to release some AI-integrated features in 2024 for one of our company's clients we had initially. My company plans to use the AI-integrated version of the solution when it is released. AI is one of the best things that I was hoping to have on Tableau.

The only issue with the solution is with its prices at a regional level. Integration-wise, it is a good product. Tableau always provides support to users. Tableau should introduce some special pricing for its existing customers, and it should be possible for the partners and resellers to provide such special prices to customers.

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Wonjae BAE - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Managing Director at dfocus

The tool's OpenAI integration was announced last year. However, it is late. Tableau is a good solution for end customers. However, there are some concerns regarding the stability and performance of its server architecture, including SaaS services. The server side appears unstable, and performance issues are noticeable, often accompanied by unclear error messages.

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DorianS - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Author at SFApps.info

Tableau is excellent at visualizing data, however, I think improving the data preparation features would be a great addition. Navigating through activities like cleansing, reshaping, and wrangling extensive or complicated datasets could prove challenging within the Tableau environment. 

Also, the settings for working with complex datasets also need to be changed. In the next version, it would be good to add user-friendly resources for beginners, such as interactive tutorials and templates, to make Tableau even more accessible to a wider audience.

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Gerardo Prado - PeerSpot reviewer
General Manager at Performma Ltda.

The product could be improved with more features in data analytics. Tableau is not currently a good database for handling built-in models for data science in order to test, train and run the models. It's not currently an AI tool or a tool for machine learning. Right now it's more for non-expert users. If they could improve their analytical capabilities for data science tasks, it would be a better product. In order to carry out data science tasks now, we have to use Vertica for big data projects to discover and run machine learning models. It would be very good if they had their own machine learning capabilities built in. I'd like to see more features in data analytics, AI and machine learning capabilities.

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it_user1192905 - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief SAP - ICT (Digital & IT) at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The licensing costs of Tableau are on the higher side and probably if you wanted more adaptability in usage across business divisions you need to have more reasonable pricing of licenses of Tableau. Tableau is a standalone product. That is a disadvantage.

Due to the fact that it is a standalone product, it has to extract the data from other ERP systems or other bespoke systems and other data systems, etc. If you have big data systems and you have got other informed decision-making tools and the data is being extracted into Tableau it is dependent on many other platforms.

In contrast, if you use SAP vertical data systems and you have SAP's Data Hub, etc., then everything is vertically integrated. The whole data pipeline is vertically integrated and there is a visualization screen right there as well. Therefore, you don't normally have to go for a separate integration process altogether or need a data extraction solution.

In the end, Tableau has got two or three disadvantages in the sense that it is not a seamlessly integrated platform, end-to-end platform. It's purely a standalone reporting tool. On top of that, the licensing cost is extremely on the higher side. Thirdly, IT divisions probably are a little bit hesitant to use Tableau due to the fact that separate training is required, and separate skill sets are needed to develop everything. 

The cost of owning the solutions from Tableau is much higher compared to any other analytical solutions.

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GC
Senior Team Lead at Peristent Systems

Tableau would be really good if we could have predefined templates. I was doing a POC another newer tool, Einstein Analytics. They have predefined templates already set up. These predefined templates do the heavy lifting for the initial dashboards. We don't have to build them from scratch. Our dashboards look really good and 20 to 30% of the look and feel of the dashboard completes with the predefined templates. If Tableau works on the predefined templates, that would be so helpful to a lot of companies. It would save time for the developers.

The pricing is a bit higher than the competition. They'll need to lower it to stay competitive.

They need to move more into machine learning AI. Right now, in a POC that I'm doing with Einstein Analytics, they are more into machine learning and AI. Tableau is lagging as of now. If they want to have a long run in the market, they need to integrate machine learning and AI. It has to be very robust.

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AE
Fintech Project Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

I think Tableau could be improved with cheaper or more flexible licensing, though this is a generic improvement and applies for any product. It would be better if they had more flexible payment and licensing plans so that they could suit small- and mid-sized organizations. 

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AK
Assistant Manager at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Many things have to be improved in Tableau. Right now, we make the calculation, and then we get that information. It would be better if business users could do that. I would ask the people at Tableau to provide that option to business users to get that information in one click.

It would be better if they automated some calculations. There should be more automation in Tableau. However, there are many things in automation mode, but it is very limited at the moment. We need automation for people who do not know much about Tableau. It would also be better if there were good community support like in Alteryx.

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Saikat-Das - PeerSpot reviewer
Techinal programmer at Walmart

The product’s router could be better in terms of readability. When we put more information on a single screen, it gets compressed and superimposed in many places while scrolling. It could be improved.

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Daria Maslovets - PeerSpot reviewer
Analytics Lead/Tableau Integrator at SOFTICO

Despite the number of available interface languages, I would like to see as many languages as possible represented in Tableau. So many companies really want to use this program and it suits them better than any other similar programs, but due to the lack of understanding of English, it is difficult for them to decide to integrate this particular product.

In addition to the existing set of common data types, Tableau Desktop has such a wonderful thing as a union of data on the principle of relationships for Multi-table. This type of union is very easy to work with the data source itself and does not overload the system.

At the moment, this type of union only exists for connections from databases. It would be nice if Tableau added this type of merging for data sources that are on the Tableau Server/Tableau Cloud.

Every three months, Tableau adds new features. There are always new features coming up.

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RP
Manager BI/Analytics and Data Management at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

There should be a focus on memory data, which is the concept of Tableau. This is where they squeeze the data into their memory. Because of that, we see performance issues on the dashboards. The architecture should be improved in such a way that the data can be better handled, like we see in the market tools, such as Domo, in which everything is cloud-based. We did a POC in which we compared Tableau with Domo and performance-wise the latter is much better.  

As such, the architecture should be improved to better handle the data.

We are seeing a shift from Tableau to Power BI, towards which most users are gravitating. This owes itself to the ease of use and their mindset of making use of Excel. Power BI offers greater ease of use. 

For the most part, when comparing all the BI tools, one sees that they work in the same format. But, if a single one must be chosen, one sees that his data can be integrated at a better place. Take real time data, for example. I know that they have the live connection, but, still, they can improve that data modeling space better.

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IH
Independent Consultant at Agility Analytics
The product's features for cloud integration need improvement. They should revise licensing and pricing models to cater to smaller enterprises. Users must be able to customize and write their code similarly to one of its competitors. Many companies have in-house data science models for Twitter or Facebook based on predictive analysis. There is a possibility of integrating these models seamlessly into Tableau. View full review »
AM
Global Data Architecture and Data Science Director at FH

Its price should be improved. Its price is much higher than Power BI and QlikView.

Programming is not easy on Tableau. For programming, you have to have a separate model. They should include programming directly on the web portion of the Tableau desktop so that people can write Python or JavaScript code for customizations instead of using a different model. Currently, Tableau Data Prep is a separate application that you have to purchase. It would be helpful if they can include Tableau Data Prep and programming languages such as R, Python in the next version.

Tableau Public, which is a community version, doesn't allow you to save your work on your desktop. They should allow it. Currently, you can only upload it in the community.

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YA
Data Visualization Specialist at Data Catalyst

I think predictive analytics is the main driver of business decisions and hence Tableau should strengthen the ability to make predictions.

The forecasting feature in Tableau in my view is too limited because it must have dates but I should be able to predict the outcome of an event without having a date as part of the input.

In situations where you are analyzing or using just one measure such as Sales, Tableau does not create the header for you. Furthermore, it is not straightforward as to how to create it.

I would like to have the ability to perform multiple pivots and creating different variables. For example, if I have the regional population for six regions and branch offices, together with the number of clients per branch, all as a record or observation, then I should be able to pivot them separately resulting in the Region, Population, Branch, and Clients.

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BA
Senior Director BI & Analytics at Hertz Global Holdings, Inc.

The performance could be better. At times, it can take up to one minute or more to open a workbook, which is very frustrating for the users.

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it_user851796 - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Vice President - BICC - Development at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I think they have just come out with a tool called Prep, which we just heard about today. It was something that was missing, a little data preparation type of tool. I believe it is an ETL tool but it's not, as far as I know, a robust type tool.

The other thing is a data modeling tool, a little bit more advanced modeling. I would like to see functionality like Cognos has in the Framework Manager.

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MR
Data Teamlead at Elmenus

Most of the problems in Tableau Online that I have noticed have to do with performance or weird, inexplicable bugs that I can't pin down. For example, you might try unloading some data, and you'll be waiting for a long time without anything happening.

These bugs always seem to happen when we perform big upgrades or do maintenance work, and we have had to send a lot of tickets for unexplained issues during these times. It doesn't seem to be a problem only for us, but also for customers all over the world, such as in Ireland, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the US, too.

As for future features, I would like to see major upgrades in Bridge and the Flow Tool, allowing us to do more data engineering work. I think it would give Tableau a big edge in the market to look into how to incorporate more data engineering tools into their product. 

Besides that, I would also like the charts to be more realistic and easier on the eyes.

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SP
Senior Data Analyst at a real estate/law firm with 10,001+ employees

They currently don't have a great Workday connector. Right now, Tableau can connect to more than 80 different types of databases or data sources, but it's challenging to connect with a few types, like Workday. So if they can come up with a better version or a connector for Workday, it will solve a lot of problems.

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PC
Associate at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

I have noticed that Tableau is not very compatible with ClickHouse. There's no direct connection to ClickHouse; you have to set up an ODBC connection.

Tableau's performance takes a hit if you have huge data. The stability and scalability could be improved.

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DG
Managing Partner at Data Pine

An area needing improvement involves the complexity of the product should you need to alter a lot of parameters. 

Definitely speaking, it's straightforward and it's very easy. Implementation problems can be dealt with by the client, in place of the user consultant. Let me give you some examples of things that could take long in a Tableau implementation. Suppose you have five different business areas in your company: marketing, supply chain, finance, HR and procurement. Let us suppose that access to HR salaries is not company-wide but is limited to only a select number of people in HR, such as the manager or the director of the department. Yet, I want people in the supply chain to be able to see and access different data from different areas. While this would not be technically difficult it would be time consuming if the businesses are very particular. There may be many policies involved in access authorization, in data availability and the like.

This can involve a very strict security process using an outside identity provider. Instead of just logging in your username and password, you may have different technologies which are more safe and secure that need different providers to interface in Tableau. Depending on the need, this will be time consuming. For instance, while I don't know how this would be in your country, suppose you have an identity provider, in Brazil, marketing in Tableau. If you go to Asia, you may sometimes have a bio-metric identity that your hand or fingers employ which is going to get back at you. In that circumstance, they are going to send you a number or a code in your cellphone, requiring two steps, one to enter the bank and the other to withdraw your money. So, these things we call an outside identity provider, meaning a different vendor or different companies who manage the servers of managing identities. These would entail an integration with Tableau and these outside companies for security purposes. This would involve them sending me files and me sending them back in order to authenticate the user into the Tableau server.

This can be time-consuming because they involve or require a different partner. Tableau is made for basic needs, such as requiring a user and a password to log in to the server; an unsophisticated architecture; or use of a single instead of a cluster of servers. If you have non-specific data security needs or you just want to analyze and sell data, that can take less than a day. But if you have technical servers, many interfaces, different providers and more serious processes, that will be time consuming. 

While Tableau does integrate with Arc server and Python server, the integration process is slow and the information is integrated in a protracted fashion. Sometimes your data will vary. You may have a vector of data. You may have a matrix of data. For some algorithms we do not use regular data, but a different data structure. Tableau does not work with these different data structures. As such, interfacing with Arc server and Python server, which are still languages that are widely used in machine learning, all happen slowly. It does not happen by a matrix of data and data vector. 

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it_user522189 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, Finance Operations at a tech company with 51-200 employees

The thing I don't like is the refresh feature . The users can have the web page open and there's a browser refresh every 10 minutes, or every 30 minutes, whatever IT sets as the refresh rate. You lose everything when you have to refresh the page and it may take 30 seconds. So, that's a bit frustrating too. You expect that when you leave a browser page open, you want it to keep that view there.

I don't know if they've introduced it yet, but there is a connector with Smartsheet. We use Smartsheets a lot for project management and capturing data. We are basically exporting from Smartsheet to Excel, and then creating in Tableau and publishing it. I believe there is a connector now but I haven't actually used it. So that would be one useful feature; more connections to data sources.

I would sometimes get an error message stating “out of system resources”, but when I checked the RAM/CPU utilization in my laptop, it would appear that I had lots of resources.

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HK
DW/BI Architect at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Tableau had some issues with parameters. In particular, prior to version 2020, they did not have dynamic parameters.

Tableau cannot work with cubes or MDX (multidimensional expressions).

For enterprise-level users that are computing millions of records, they need to improve the features.

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RK
Application Development Assoc Manager at Eccenture

SAP BusinessObjects has some semantic layer designs that give the flexibility to do ad hoc reporting or dashboard designing. If that can be brought into Tableau, it would be great. We have the data in the database, but we should also be able to bring something between the database and the dashboard and do some semantic layer modeling for ad hoc reporting requirements.

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BC
IT Manager at Glovis Europe

An improvement would be changing the design of the layout of the dashboard from the business side. Sometimes there are requests for the possibility to enhance the performance and the data depending on what they need more of. It depends on the situation.

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RS
Business Analyst at a media company with 10,001+ employees

The price is definitely a point that can be improved because smaller firms, like my bank firm, don't use Tableau because it's an expensive tool. If there were an option that catered toward smaller firms, that would be great because Tableau does in fact help with a lot of different kinds of data sources. For instance, it lets you upload CSV on Excel. However, other tools that we currently use, such as Looker, do not let you upload Excel files for ad hoc analysis. So, definitely, this is something price-wise that can be catered toward smaller firms.

Creating variables, creating new fields in Tableau during analysis, actually adds columns to the data. That's something that could potentially give us an option. Do you want it as a column added to the data set or do you want it ad hoc in the visualization sheet? So if you create a measurement or a dimension, that creates a new column, but if you try to create a new filter directly on the visualization, it doesn't let you rename it. Basically what you see is just the calculation that you put in there. If you wanted to create something without making it an extra column in the data set, you can't just rename it to a more user-friendly short name. An improvement would be adding the ability to rename ad hoc creations if you do create a mark or a filter on the visualization. That doesn't really get added to the actual data fields.

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Jagannadha Rao - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Data Scientist at International School of Engineering

I have used Power BI as well as Tableau. There are a couple of interesting features that I like in Power BI, but they are not present in Tableau. For example, in Power BI, if I am looking at country-wise population, I can type and ask for the country that has the maximum population, and it will automatically give an answer and address that query. This kind of feature is not there in Tableau.

Similarly, in Power BI, for integrating with the latest ML algorithms, we have decision trees and primarily multiple machine learning algorithms. The decision tree essentially visualizes the patterns in the data. We don't have such a feature in Tableau. If Tableau can integrate with the machine learning algorithms and help us to do visualizations, it would be a wonderful combination. Most of the people are going for Tableau primarily for visualization purposes. However, in the data science industry, users want to do model building as well as tell a story. As of now, Tableau is fulfilling the requirements for visualization purposes. If they can bring it up to a level where I can use it for machine learning purposes as well as for visualization, it would be very helpful. Many people who want to do data science don't want to write a code. Tableau is anyway a drag and drop tool, and if they can provide those options as well, it will be a powerful combination.

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SA
Founder and CEO at Information Age Consulting

I would like to have the product be more flexible in terms of creating online shared dashboards. When I need to publish a public dashboard, I use Tableau Public. However, I don't find it flexible compared to Tableau Online, which is the paid version. Tableau Public is a free Tableau portal in which I can publish my data, however, Tableau Public doesn't provide the flexibility that I find in Tableau Online. If we compare this with other tools, such as Zoho Analytics, for example, publishing web-based shared dashboards is more flexible, in terms of publishing web-based shared dashboards.

If they can add the feature of machine learning and the predictive analysis to Tableau, it would be very helpful. After Salesforce acquired Tableau, they have been merging Salesforce with Tableau, in terms of machine learning. That said, in this case, I need to use two products - Salesforce and Tableau. I want to have the Einstein tool, which is available now in Salesforce, be integrated into Tableau, so I don't have to use Salesforce for machine learning, to use the Einstein tool, and I can use Tableau for the product. If the Einstein tool for machine learning is integrated into Tableau, that would be very good for us.

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UD
Manager, Business Intelligence at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We need big servers to perform the operations that we are doing. They should probably relook at its architecture. 

There are limitations to the data source that we are building. We can put only 32 tables in a data source, which means we have to transfer some of the workload to a database.

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CC
Partner at Bambino & Partners

The forecast instrument. I still use my primary software (that is Quantrix Modeler) to build my financial models. 

I’m not saying that is a “static” platform at the moment, it’s dynamic due to the fact that you can build parameters, however it's not the same as a spreadsheet in which you can write formulas and algotythms that are more and more complex. 

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AG
Digital Strategy Manager at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

Tableau is good, however, it lacks a bit on the integration side if you compare it to Power BI, for example. Power BI has quite a good amount of connectors. Even though Tableau does have some, Power BI works well with the Microsoft environment and most of the firms are in granular detail. That's where Microsoft shines. Maybe Tableau can collaborate with other bigger, well-recognized solutions in order to get an edge in the market the way Power BI does with Microsoft. 

The pricing is a bit expensive.

There's a bit of a learning curve for those new to implementing the solution.

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ST
Operations & BI Analyst at American Hospital Dubai

There is another ETL tool for Tableau that is new. It takes time to reach some level of experience. IN Power BI, they have Power Query. I find it easier to convert the information in Power Query with a single shortcut key. That's not an option in Tableau. 

You have to prepare your data. It will take a lot of time to clean the data. 

There's no mature ETL tool in Tableau, which is quite a negative for them. They need to offer some built-in ETL tool that has a nice and easy drag-and-drop functionality.

There needs to be a bit more integration capability.

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CC
Partner at Bambino & Partners

I would like them to include the Italian language, even if it's not a problem for me to use English, because the Quantrix modeler is only in English. I can also see there is Portuguese, Japanese, and Chinese, so why not Italian?

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PB
(2IC) Senior System Analyst at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

At this stage, we haven’t had any suggestions since moving to Tableau 10.3, so there may be improvements requested further down the line.

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Aruna  Basnayake - PeerSpot reviewer
AGM - Digital Engineering & Strategic Solutions at DMS Software Technologies (Pvt) Ltd.

There should be stronger data modules for the platform.

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AN
Solution Architect at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

I also work as an SME on the platform side. Tableau is very nice and jazzy for the end-users, but there are pain points for the admins. Performance is something about which we hear a lot of complaints, such as the dashboard doesn't open in time. It performs well on the desktop but not on the server. I know that there is always a limitation when it comes to a huge amount of data or the complexity of the calculations, but we often hear from end-users about the performance on the server side. It is easy to drag and drop all the columns and do what we want, but if it is not going to load better on the server, users are not going to like it.

Their standard support is not good. They should improve it. I don't know if it has anything to do with the acquisition, but lately, their support has not been great.

Their upgrades have always been an issue. They never work. 

Tableau is a little bit costlier than other tools such as Power BI.

They should make it easy to integrate with tools like SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, etc. Its integration with Office 365 should be improved because most of the users already have tools like Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint, and they want to integrate a reporting tool or a visualization tool with their existing tools. 

It is very easy to integrate scripting in Spotfire. We can do a lot of changes in the UI by writing some scripts. That could be something that Tableau can look into. They can also consider providing APIs, but most of the people who work with Tableau do not really work much on the scripting side. So, I am not sure if it is feasible or required technically.

View full review »
AG
Senior tech architect at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

One thing I would want to change for Tableau is to have a lower-cost model. It's pretty high for enterprise deployment.

In the next release, I would like to have the capability to call machine learning models within Python while I'm building a dashboard. The value calculation should be a machine learning model, which is running somewhere else, on say, Amazon. These tools give good outputs, like calculated fields and all. But today the outputs are not straightforward. In simple terms, I need machine learning on the fly. That is not there.

View full review »
SK
Manager, BI & Analytics at Perceptive Analytics

An advanced type of visualization is a bit tricky to create. It has something called a Calculated field, and that sometimes gets a bit difficult to use when you want to create an advanced type of visualization.

View full review »
BW
Lead of Business Intelligence at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

The Hyper Extract functionality is not as strong as that provided by Microsoft SQL.

Tableau is not as strong as Oracle OBIEE in some regards.

View full review »
Shady Mogawer - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at Arabian Cement Company

I'd like it to work without the workflow or pushing options from the build, every time you need to do a refresh. We need a workflow for pushing the data to the cloud or to the server when you are using the pre-built application, the new application.

In the cloud sometimes the performance is a little bit slow.

View full review »
CR
Director Consultoria at tecnoscala consulting

There were a lot of dashboards everywhere in the organization, however, when the company wanted to get the operational databases they were not connected.

The solution needs to improve its integration capabilities.

The performance and security could be better.

Many people saw Tableau as a silver bullet and it isn't. It's good for small things, however, not for an institutional way of doing things.

I'd like to see better integration with SAP.

I'd like an integrated ETL or some sort of data preparation capabilities. 

View full review »
RD
Owner at Richard Duggan Pty Ltd

I am not a frequent user of this solution, so I am not sure what they've been doing recently. The last time when I used it, I had to use other tools with it for data extraction and cleansing.

Its price should also be improved. It is more expensive than Power BI. In terms of training, there is generally better online training for Power BI, but I am not sure of that. It would be helpful to know from where to access its training.

View full review »
TS
Senior Manager Analytic & Insights at a hospitality company with 10,001+ employees

It would be nice if we could export more raw data. Currently, there is a limit as to how much data you can export.

View full review »
JM
Data Warehouse Manager at a construction company with 10,001+ employees

I’d like to see the forecasting capabilities expanded from an algorithm standpoint to offer different options for multi-variate forecasting. I think they can improve the ability to integrate with web pages. I’d like to see a more secure option for data regarding HIPAA regulations.

View full review »
LC
MBA, MS Business Analytics at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

It's a little more complicated than Power BI.

More visualization options, but not the same as in Power BI, where there are simply more options. I see very few options here. Many of these must be customized and custom-built, which is a lengthy process.

I would like to see more options in visualization customization.

People are migrating to Microsoft BI due to the speed, which is quite slow to load, and the lack of visualization options. There are a few default options in Power BI that Tableau does not have.

I would like to see the added visualizations and possibly an easier way to process data, which are useful now that we all have Power BI, there is a whole power query interface that directly links to Microsoft BI, whereas with Tableau, I would have to go through an entirely different process for it.

View full review »
AG
Associate Director at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

While my experience has been mostly positive, there are certain limitations, as every tool has.

If I have to develop any, for example, pie charts, I can develop them just fine. However, if I have to develop a donut chart, that I cannot do it in a simple way. There are tricks that I need to use if I have to design a donut chart. It should be more flexible and provide more visualization options.

It does not provide detailed reporting like other reporting tools such as Microstrategy or Cognos, or other enterprise reporting solutions.

If they could provide better reporting as well as visualization, it would be a perfect product.

Pricing is a major thing. If someone has to use it within an organization, it is not that cost-effective, especially when a competitor like Power BI or some other reporting tool comes almost free along with their cloud solution. If someone is opting for any cloud solution, any cloud platform, especially if I talk about Microsoft, they will give you Power BI almost free of cost, or at a minimal cost. In such scenarios, people would prefer using Power BI or a similar kind of tool rather than using Tableau. That is a major concern which Tableau should look into.

View full review »
SS
Data Management Team Lead at a energy/utilities company with 201-500 employees

Truthfully, this solution offers pretty much everything that I need for my everyday tasks.

It seems that power BI is more targeted for report creation while Tableau is more of just a dashboard. If you need to have something report-like, or downloadable to share outside of the dashboard, that's where Tableau is lacking some features. 

Users would like to be able to export an Excel file when they see a table or something like that. That's not an out-of-the-box feature for Tableau.

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LV
Director of Professional Services, Analytics at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees

With Tableau, there is a gap in its ability to handle very large-scale data. I would like it to be similar to the rest of the solutions, which can handle terabytes of data.

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it_user251337 - PeerSpot reviewer
DHS HQ at a government with 10,001+ employees

It is good for its use if ad hoc, offline, or needed for quick turnaround on reports/dashboards. It is not so great when it comes to data exchange/integration, data mining, etc. I rely on what’s available in current versions to see what APIs and plugins that I can use and they have Open Source on GitHub is a plus to share things to re-use.

Room for improvement is more on data integration features that are agnostic to any solution platform but can be plug and play to be able to reuse what was built out Tableau in any other platform of work.

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it_user206340 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Business Intelligence Analyst at a logistics company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Connectivity seems to be a sticky point, but it's also a hard nut to crack at the level that I would love to see. Tableau is fast, razor sharp on the whole - WHEN you use an extract. The problem is querying the data to fill the extract is only as fast as the source system. The result is that when you start working with large volumes of data, you often must start finding creative ways to improve the performance of your query. Here's where it gets tricky. I almost exclusively use SQL Server as a source. When I want to create custom data for an analysis (or some ongoing report with complexity), I have the latitude to write custom SQL. The problem is that in order for Tableau to retrieve metadata, the query sent to the server arrives as a subquery like:

SELECT * from ([your custom SQL here]) x

Because of this, I can't use a host of very useful T-SQL techniques that improve query performance or clarity. No CTEs, no temp tables, etc. In some organizations, the argument is that if you want that kind of complexity, wrap it up in a stored procedure and call the procedure (which, yes, you can call sprocs in Tableau), but that comes with its own disadvantages, which I won't get into too much here. But that is not to mention not all report writers or analysts have the privileges to create or alter sprocs on a server within their organization.

In any case, depending on how much control you have over your database as a Tableau user, as well as the nature of the data you are pulling, you may find yourself having to be very creative just to get data TO tableau to create larger extracts.

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it_user424317 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, Business and Clinical Analytics at a healthcare company with 201-500 employees

- More advanced capabilities to format dashboards
- More advanced data merging from multiple data sources
- More advanced management of data extracts

View full review »
it_user294300 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology Architect at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

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.

View full review »
Salma Hosni - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Customer Success Engineer at a educational organization with 51-200 employees

The charts need to be improved. The drawings and the visualization need to be more accurate.

I would like to see the visualization improved.

View full review »
MS
Director - Technology Operations at a educational organization with 10,001+ employees

There are no significant improvements needed. 

It would be nice to include more features on each dashboard. 

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DS
Business Intelligence Architect at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

The extraction, transformation and loading of data in Tableau takes a lot of time and we do not have confidence that Tableau is showing all the data we need. This is due to limitations on data extraction which needs to be improved.

We experience user restrictions using Tableau and require a more dynamic setup for extraction of data, configuration of reports and providing access to users. 

Tableau useful for dashboard reporting, however, there are limitation on the number of rows of data you can view in a report. It is for this reason that we use Tableau alongside other reporting solutions. Tableau does not support any HTML coding in the same way Power BI does. 

There is a maximum number of tables we can use in Tableau. This could be improved in a future release.

View full review »
SS
Program Manager at a non-profit with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user237714 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Analyst at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Some of the command choices have to be memorized and are not intuitive. It could be even easier to learn.

View full review »
Steve-Jose - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Research Analyst at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

Its documentation can be improved so that a user can get a good hands-on experience. Tableau is well documented, and on their website, there are a lot of tutorials that are available for free. I started my learning process through those tutorials, but there are certain loopholes in those tutorials, which only got filled through a couple of good YouTube channels that talk about Tableau. YouTube helped me a lot. So, the documentation could be better, I understand that it is evolving day by day, and with more usage, there would be more such documentation.

There are a couple of features that are only available in the cloud version, and I would like to see them in the hosted version. We can only use them in a demo or temporary account for 10 or 15 days, but I would love to see those features in the hosted version that I am using, which is Tableau Public.

View full review »
reviewer1545645 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Management and Analytics Manager at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

There could be improvements on the mobile application, it is lacking features. 

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SS
Assistant Vice President at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

An issue that is common to both Tableau and Power BI is with large data sets. When it comes to large datasets, the data should be extracted faster.

Tableau should offer the end-user a desktop version that is free where they can go in and practice. There are other solutions that offer it for free such as Huawei, and the desktop version of Power BI is also free.

People tend to know if they want to learn visualization. They don't have a proper tool in place, they don't know how to or where to go to learn. If you give them the tool to learn and let them explore when they want to go into production, people are able to purchase the license. A 14-day trial version would not be enough time.

View full review »
Rajdeep Biswas - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Architect - Sr. Manager at Axtria - Ingenious Insights

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.

View full review »
IB
Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

View full review »
BH
Software Quality Assurance Engineer at Syapse

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.

View full review »
SK
Vice President Engineering Intellicloud at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user712779 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user493419 - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Manager - Emory University (Tableau) at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

View full review »
Syed Fahad Anwar - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal System Developer at HHRC

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.

View full review »
Nicolas MRSIC - PeerSpot reviewer
Responsible for Domaine Applicatif at NRJ

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.

View full review »
HM
Data Product Manager at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

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.

View full review »
RW
Process Data Engineer (Subsurface and Wells) at Shell

Sometimes it crashes because of the huge database. This could be fixed so that it works smoothly with large databases.

View full review »
AM
Pre-Sales Technical Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

The user interface and ease of use requires a bit of a learning curve to pick up. No drag and drop functionality at the development stage, unlike its competitors.

The data preparation is quite good but not as powerful as the one I use or would recommend for data manipulation and cleansing as well. Tableau seems to focus on the data visualization end and provides, or has partnered with, some other software for data preparation.

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it_user569868 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Analysis Team Leader at Viber

Data science: Tableau lacks machine learning algorithms that you can implement using R, SPSS Modeler, and Python. It has clustering and time-series forecasting abilities which are helpful, but adding machine learning capabilities like decision trees, CHAID analysis and K-means would make this product perfect! Tableau has a connector to R; you can use the ML algorithms there and visualize it back in the Tableau.

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it_user73488 - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing Member at Christina M. Durta, CPA, LLC

Tableau Public is free, which is incredible. However, the paid version is too expensive per user. They need to reduce the cost of the user that is not making the analysis, but only reading / drilling down on the results. It is hard to get a client to pay that kind of money to view reports.

From my conversations with Tableau, their product Tableau Online is what allows others to view and interact with data online privately. The cost per online user is $500 per year. There is a free Tableau Reader, but it is limited. So, if I wanted to make data visualizations for a client or within my own company, I would have to pay for the desktop software to make the visuals plus pay an additional fee for everyone who wants to use the full functions online. Tableau Public is free and an awesome tool, but it is all publicly available.

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it_user3678 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Consultant, Author, Trainer on Tableau Software, Speaker with 51-200 employees
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. View full review »
AS
CEO at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

A specific thing in Tableau is that I have looked at how to add pictures to the reports. I don't have the ability in Tableau to create a tooltip and see the picture of a piece of jewelry or watch that is a best seller.

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SB
Fleet Reporting Specialist at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

Tableau would be difficult to implement without training or the in-house technical support we have.

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SK
Manager, BI & Analytics at Perceptive Analytics

I would like to see the inclusion of a template to create a speedometer chart. I can understand that Tableau doesn’t have it as one of its default chart types because it’s not a good way to represent the data. Indeed that’s true, but speedometers are quite popular and once we had a client who was insistent on having highly-customizable speedometers and I had to spend a good amount of time to create them via multiple workarounds. In my experience, I've seen many customers who do not want to consider alternatives to speedometers.

I’ll address these two points:

  • Speedometers/dial charts are a not-so-good way to represent data
  • I had to resort to multiple workarounds to create a speedometer in Tableau

First, I’ll give you a few reasons as to why speedometers are not considered to be a good way to visualize data:

  1. Low data-ink ratio: ‘Data’ here refers to the data that you want to show on your chart/graph and ‘ink’ refers to the aesthetic elements of the chart such as lines, colors, indicators or any other designs. A low data-ink ratio implies that the quantity of ‘ink’ on the chart is very high relative to the small quantity of ‘data’ that is present on the chart. What does a speedometer or a dial chart do? It shows you the current state (value) of any system. Therefore, the data shown by the chart is just one number. Let’s come to the ‘ink’ part. Needless to say, there is a lot of ‘ink’ on a speedometer chart – so many numbers all around the dial, the dial itself, a needle that points to the actual number etc. The fundamental principle of data visualization is to communicate information in the simplest way possible, without complicating things. Therefore, best practices in data visualization are aimed at reducing visual clutter because this will ensure that the viewer gets the message – the right message – quickly, without being distracted or confused by unnecessary elements.
  2. Make perception difficult: The human brain compares lines better than it does angles – information in a linear structure is perceived more easily and quickly than that in a radial one.Let's say I’m showing multiple gauges on the same screen. What's the purpose of visualizing data? It's to enable the user to derive insights - insights upon which decisions can be taken. The more accurate the insights, the better the decisions. So, its best that the visualization does everything that helps the user understand it in the easiest possible way. Hence, the recommended alternative to a dial chart is a bullet chart
  3. Occupy more space: Assume that there are 4 key process indicators (KPIs) that I need to show on screen and the user needs to know whether each KPI is above or below a pre-specified target. If I were to use dial charts I’ll be creating 4 dials – one for each KPI. On the other hand, if I were to use bullets, I’ll be creating just one chart where the 4 KPIs will be listed one below the other and each one in addition to showing its actual and target values, will also show by how much the actual exceeds/falls short of the target in a linear fashion. As real estate on user interfaces is at a premium, believe me, this is definitely better.

Now, let me come to my situation where my client would not accept anything but a speedometer. As I’ve mentioned in the review, Tableau doesn’t provide a speedometer template by default. So when I was going through forums on the Internet I saw that people usually used an image of a speedometer and put their data on top of that image and thereby creating speedometers in Tableau.

This would not have worked in my case because my client wanted to show different bands (red, yellow and green) and the number of bands and bandwidths varied within and between dials. For example, one dial would have 2 red bands (one between 0 and 10 and the other between 90 and 100), 1 yellow band and 1 green band while another would have just one yellow band between 40 and 50 and no red or green bands. Also, these bands and bandwidths would be changed every month and the client needed to be able to do this on their own. Therefore, using a static background image of a dial was out of the question.

So, here’s what I did: I created an Excel spreadsheet (let’s call it data 1; used as one of the 2 data sources for the dial) in which the user would be able to define the bands and bandwidths. The spreadsheet had a list of numbers from one to hundred and against each number, the user could specify the band (red/green/yellow) in which it falls. The other data source (data 2) was an Excel sheet containing the numbers to be indicated on the dials. Then, in Tableau, I created a chart which had 2 pies – one on top of the other. Both the pies had numbers from 1 to 100 along the border, providing the skeleton for the dial. The top pie used data 1 and had the red, yellow and green bands spanning the numbers from 1 to 100. I then created a calculated field having an ‘if’ condition: if the number in data 2 matched the number in data 1, the field would have a value ‘yes’. Otherwise, it would have a value ‘no’. This will produce only 1 ‘yes’ and 99 ‘no’s’ because there will be only 1 true match. I put this calculated field onto the ‘Color’ shelf and chose black for ‘yes’ and white for ‘no’ – this formed the content of the bottom pie. So the bottom pie had 99 white colored slices (which looked like one huge slice) and just 1 black slice (which looked like a needle). I made the top pie containing the red, yellow & green bands more transparent and this gave the appearance of a needle pointing to the KPI value, also indicating into which band the number fell, thereby enabling the client to gauge their performance.

View full review »
SP
Sr Business Intel at WestJet Airlines

Licensing and pricing options could be made better so that more users would be able to use it. The biggest concern any organization has is its budget when trying to implement a new product. Tableau is an extremely powerful tool and hence expensive, but if there was a way to cut down the cost they would end up attracting more users.

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it_user338343 - PeerSpot reviewer
Advisor at a retailer with 501-1,000 employees

The key feature of Tableau that has room for improvement is its performance with structured and unstructured data. I'm not sure I would suggest that Tableau go for a hardware oriented solution for this. Nevertheless, that would not be a bad approach to enhance the product and align with current marketing trends and its competitors.

View full review »
it_user72435 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Metadata/reuse, performance/scalability at high data volumes + high user concurrency, disparity between desktop vs. web versions – need to address enterprise requirements in general.

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it_user403101 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Analyst at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We need a Tableau connector to connect to other BI tools like SAP BusinessObjects.

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AK
BI Specialist at a educational organization with 501-1,000 employees

It needs a more robust way to connect and share the "big-data" origin. It also needs an easy-to-develop interface for creating new charts and tools in business dashboards.

View full review »
it_user357120 - PeerSpot reviewer
Management Consultant at a consultancy with 5,001-10,000 employees

Calculated fields are relatively simple and may leave a user wanting. Joining between multiple datasets also needs to be improved. (I heard this is an improvement that will be made with the version 10 release this summer.) Source data formatting requirements are a little particular, and reloading for new users can get repetitive.

View full review »
it_user421578 - PeerSpot reviewer
VP, Business Insights at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
  • They still need to improve advanced query functions. Level of detail and table calcs have improved but still are difficult to use, especially when working with large data sets.
  • The custom query editor has lots of room for improvement. If Tableau can add features and functionality here, it would be easier to work with the database in one environment, instead of having to open another query editor to develop custom queries for advanced analytics.
  • The formatting interface is the one area that has lots of room for improvement, as well as the ability to be more precise in formatting. At the moment, it is much more of an all-or-none proposition.
  • More integrated statistical functions.
View full review »
KB
Managing Partner at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Tableau's data modeling, mining, and AI library features need improvement. View full review »
AE
Business Intelligence Analyst at a government with 10,001+ employees

There are more than a powerful tool in the market, such as Microsoft BI.

View full review »
AG
Director at Decision Science
  • Conditional formatting could be an interesting feature to provide to final users. It is a long-term request of our users.
  • The data preparation/blending options are very basic. They could be improved.
  • More willing to hear customer/user suggestions.
View full review »
RM
Principal Consultant at University of Utah Hospital
  • The enterprise features need improvements.
  • Improvements in schema security and row/column security need to be made.
View full review »
it_user844137 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at California Department of Corrections

Deployment of dashboards to viewers and unit supervisors can be prohibitively expensive.

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it_user494277 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, Strategic Data Analytics at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

I would like to see improvement in licensing. It is expensive to provide licenses beyond the 10 we already have.

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it_user434919 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sole Proprietor at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

Version-specific work did not automatically version up with the upgrade. Since the version change occurred during the course and the majority of us had never used Tableau before, this static versioning for the projects caused some anxiety and some rework. There might have been an easier way to move these projects to the new version, but it was not transparent how to do that and online resources referenced an older version solution that did not work in the newer version.

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it_user357624 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager Business Intelligence and Analytics at a hospitality company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I am very excited about Tableau 10 and what has been built into the beta. I think with those changes and some we saw at TC15 that are coming, the product is poised to remain the industry leader.

I would like to see Tableau provide a bit better integration with the Microsoft Office platform. You can download your dashboard data to CSV or crosstab, but it’s not optimal. Even if it’s the best dashboard design ever, there are users that still want to see the numbers underneath. Until data visualization reaches a critical mass, like Excel did in the late 90s to early 2000s, we still will need a way to give access to some of the underlying data in an easy way for Microsoft Office to consume.

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it_user4008 - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO with 1,001-5,000 employees

The basic design of Tableau has some features that could be modified.

* There is no need to have five (5) ways to add a new worksheet. Brevity is rewarded - new users have so much to learn that 2 ways would do the job

* How to render time - When performing analysis, no single issue is more important than time series data. Tableau uses visual clues in many places - When one uses the pull down option for time that could be visualized better as a continuum. those selections should be presented in green to be visually consistent. Those above in blue.

View full review »
BW
Technical Lead at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Its integration with Microsoft products such as Teams should be improved.

View full review »
XH
Senior BI Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

They must have a write-back solution. You must have the ability to write back into the database, otherwise, it prevents full automation.

That's one reason why people still need their own Excel sheets and other tools where they can interact with data that's already in the database. You win completely the moment you load that in, in a central way. You could say that you are completely automated.

They need a write-back; that is what is missing. If they get the write back to the database, they will be fully automated, but for the time being, they are not.

View full review »
PA
Lead Data Architect at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

It should have more integration with different tools and technologies. Its licensing cost should also be improved.

View full review »
RG
Head of Data Architecture at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

I would like the solution to have certain features allowing the delivery of reports to the email. For example, publishing Pixel Perfect reports.

View full review »
JJ
Principal Partner at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

With Tableau, when you're dealing with very large datasets, it can be slow so the performance is an area that can be improved.

The security can be improved.

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CR
Director Consultoria at tecnoscala consulting

The SQL programming functionality needs to be improved.

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KS
Manager Technology at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

We would like a report model, because currently there is no schema that we can create in the tool.

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AF
Ejecutivo de cuentas at Kantar Worldpanel

The use of this service in the desktop version is annoying due to the constant updates which lead to reinstalling the application. If they could give support with updates on the same downloaded version, it would be great.

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it_user152685 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, Analytics at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Pace of improvement to product has slowed. Most additions are now just nice to have.

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it_user91872 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior HR Analyst at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Formatting controls could use some improvement. We’ve found that to be the most confusing part of developing reports, at least until you get use to where all the controls are at and how to use them. Ideally, making a user-friendly interface for formatting the worksheets and dashboards would be a big improvement and time saver. Recent version upgrades have added some new features such as being able to change the format for your entire workbook all at once. Still a work in progress though.

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it_user4008 - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • 100% in the cloud.
  • Reduce the price once in the cloud.
  • Go back to emphasizing simplicity.
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it_user349755 - PeerSpot reviewer
President at a non-profit with 51-200 employees

It would be great if the licensing cost per user was cheaper.

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it_user434643 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Business Analyst at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

It’s a very basic thing, but being able to copy and paste data elements from the screen would be nice.

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it_user291708 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Warehouse Consultant Sr at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

If it had a semantic layer, it would be great. I know Tableau is not meant for data modeling but the data warehouse is not always perfect. Without a semantic layer, we need to reach out to the ETL team for even small data model changes.

Also, a semantic layer would have allowed for building 'subject areas' by grouping tables and defining joins. This would then allow users with appropriate permissions to build ad-hoc reports without having to worry about table joins.

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it_user176814 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director

The trend I see from clients is towards more mobile solutions, more real-time analytics, and the integration of analytics and order entry. E.g. A sales consultant can seamlessly transition from sales analysis to entering an order while on-site. This implies a BPM integration with SAP, Oracle eBusiness Suite, SFDC and others.

The architecture this client was prototyping was an SFDC application with imbedded analytics provided by Tableau delivered to a tablet device. There are several ways to go about this, but the architecture was selected because SFDC was the system of record for all customer information.

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it_user164856 - PeerSpot reviewer
Financial Analyst at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees

While Tableau is flexible it doesn't deal well with data that comes in a predetermined organization- i.e. data cubes. Our team has repeatedly had trouble trying to import raw data if it had any predetermined structure.

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NR
Software Developer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

The product has some limitations. Creating empty extracts is not easy. We faced some issues in the initial phase. Creating extracts side by side with multiple lines is not possible in Tableau. This feature is available in Power BI.

If we want to make any changes to the server, we must have the Administrator role. The product should also allow users with Explorer roles to make these changes.

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LS
Senior Software Engineer - Salesforce at DataGo

Some of our clients are looking for better UI when using Tableau as they often work with this solution directly. 

The solution could be improved by facilitating integration with data lakes such as Google Cloud Platform. Some of our clients have around 1 billion lines in their tables and usually we need to scale them from MySQL to a Google Cloud Platform.

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JR
IT Manager of Integration at a non-tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The product needs to allow for better ways to drill down more effectively on the information at hand. Users should be able to dive into the information in an easier way. Right now, it's a bit too difficult. 

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VJ
Director of Product Management at a computer software company with 11-50 employees

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. 

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JP
Product Consultant at a tech consulting company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Tableau is an end-to-end analytics platform, and it is doing a pretty good job in terms of connecting to the data and analyzing it. It can, however, do better in terms of data management and the ETL features, which are not on the advanced analytics or machine learning side. Tableau Prep is where users would want to see more advancements. They can improve Tableau Prep, which is an analytic platform tool for data cleansing. People who work with data spend most of their time curating the data. Cleaning up the data and getting it ready for analysis is what takes the most time. If Tableau can invest more time in improving the Tableau Prep platform, it would be great. 

Previously, Tableau didn't have the functionality for writing to a database. So, you couldn't really alter the database tables and write to your database, but they fixed that in one of the very recent releases. However, it isn't really advanced and should be improved.

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RA
Architect at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I am a BI consultant. I have worked on different reporting tools, such as Power BI and MicroStrategy. As compared to other tools, Tableau lags behind in handling huge enterprise-level data in terms of robust security and the single integrated metadata concept. When we connect to large or very big databases, then performance-wise, I sometimes found Tableau a little bit slow.

It can have the single metadata concept like other tools for the reusability of the objects in multiple reports.

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it_user614262 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Development Engineer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
  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.
View full review »
it_user552978 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Principal at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

There are certain things that I would want it to do, but it wouldn't be something that I could easily describe.

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it_user244335 - PeerSpot reviewer
Program Manager (Graduate Assistant) at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most important feature that Tableau must introduce is to provide 'reference hints' for every dimension and measure. For example: When working with numerous dimensions and measures, it's difficult to debug and back track to determine whether a certain dimension was used in a visualization, tool tip, filter, parameter, or action. It would be great to debug and back track already developed Tableau dashboards.

I’d also like to see the following features introduced or improved:

  • Auto-Save or Backup feature. There have been quite a few instances when Tableau crashed after substantial dashboard development and I had to start over from the scratch because the work was not saved. The best workaround for this is to be diligent and create manual backups and save as work is progressing.
  • Performance with 32-bit computers. There have been numerous instances when Tableau threw an out-of-memory error when working on a 32-bit system.
  • Performance in general. Tableau works best with light data sets. Although extract optimization is a good way to improve performance, it can be better.
  • I feel the user interface for adding actions is complicated. It can be made simple and intuitive.
View full review »
it_user374601 - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Vice President, Institutional Analysis at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

Tableau does an excellent job upgrading the software with each release. One thing we have been waiting for is the ability to import an ArcGIS Shapefile into a custom map. There is a workaround using a third-party utility but it is unstable.

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it_user204687 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Performance improvement: Handling a huge amount of data and loading reports in a minimal time frame.

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it_user387408 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant Director at DataBound Solutions

It came at a cost. Developers end-up, many times, scratching their left ear with the right hand, in order to make visualizations more powerful, effective or appealing than off-the-shelf ones. The next challenge for Tableau will be combining ease of use for basic-to-mid level complexity design (self-serve, "power users") with flexibility and repeatable development in a corporate environment (professional designers), avoiding "hat tricks" or "cookbook" style.

Also, when building corporate dashboards, it may be challenging to gain the type of control needed without having to resort into some forum tricks or Zen-Master's advice. Workbook, connection versioning, and governance would be great for mid-to-large size organizations. Server-wise, having options to trigger alarms to an Administrator under certain conditions would also be an asset.

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WL
Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Tableau has so many functions, so sometimes it's hard to find the right solution quickly. I have to search multiple menu bars to find the right command.

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SV
Senior Consultant at ICTPro

If you mainly need a tool for BI reporting, it's not the best option. Tableau needs better abilities to generate simple reports, integrate, create databases, and work with data lakes. 

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AC
Project Manager at a local government with 51-200 employees

Personally, I have not extensively used it, and therefore it's hard to think of areas that might need improvement as I haven't fully experienced every aspect of the product. 

I'd like to see more advanced forms of charting, if possible. 

There should be more widgets that would help less trained individuals create charts with less difficulty.

Tableau probably does not have advanced big data analysis features. It's not in the same category. It doesn't have those features to the same degree as R. You do this recreational; kind of modeling and analytics. It does have some predictive items, however, it's very simple. You can't customize much.

View full review »
DK
BI technical analyst at a government with 11-50 employees

The data preparation could integrate better with Tableau.

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Muhammed Shafad - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Data Analyst at 6d Technologies

It should offer better features for customization. It would be nice to have features such as border design.

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CD
Vice President, Business Analytics at a logistics company with 10,001+ employees

I would like Tableau to handle geospatial data better in terms of multiple layers and shapefiles.

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it_user110451 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Needs a metadata solution plus some enhanced ETL functionality.

Edit: v9 introduced some light metadata solutions that are helpful from Excel.

View full review »
it_user205026 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Architect at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees

Many areas for improvement are in Enterprise features. Some of which are:

1. A private folder on the server for a user to store his/her files.

2. A built-in tool for deployment and migration between multiple Tableau Server environments.

3. Ability to share a "database connection" between multiple Tableau data sources so that one change to connection information will be reflected in multiple data sources which share that connection.

4. Email distribution: Delivering analytics via emails on enterprise scale is difficult.

Areas for improvement in Visual Analytics:

1. Blending improvements: Slow performance when two sources are blended together on a high cardinality dimension. Blending does not support full outer join and does not allow using non-additive measures ( e.g. count distinct, average) from secondary data sources.


Update for Tableau 10.1: Some of the above are getting addressed in version or in future version as per Tableau road-map declared at Tableau Conference 2016 in Austin, TX. Specifically, there may be features for private folder in future. Tableau migration pains are somewhat alleviated with TabMigrate, their open source tool ( no support) and email distribution is getting better with conditional subscriptions ( 10.1).

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it_user203766 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Business Analyst at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

We were not able to implement organization-wide security the way it exists in BO or OBIEE. We had to do a workaround to restrict access by transferring roles on the portal using Java and PHP to restrict content.

The second area for improvement is the processing large amount of data using R.

Finally, I’d like to see Tableau have more statistical capability.

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it_user193086 - PeerSpot reviewer
VP Associate Director at a marketing services firm with 501-1,000 employees

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

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it_user5220 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager of IT at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

The integration of multiple data sources has sometimes been difficult and the size limitations are sometimes an issue.

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it_user163215 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Analyst/Engineer/Process lead at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The tool is not perfect, but with each release issues are getting resolved and performance is getting better. There is an awesome "Ideas" page on their website that allows users to submit ideas for improvement and vote on ideas that they would like to see added into any of the Tableau products. Tableau does a great job of moving these ideas from conception to reality.

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BN
Anonymous at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees

I would look at Tableau's security and performance. I take a long time to process the hundreds of thousands or millions of records that must be processed every day. I am hoping that it can be improved very soon.

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MJ
Solutions Architect at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The process of embedding the dashboards on external portals and websites could be improved. We also experienced challenges with integration with analytics.

In an upcoming release, if the capabilities of Tableau Prep are improvised and expanded, that would be an added advantage.

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MH
Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I'm not sure if the solution needs any improvements. It's the best solution we have here right now.

The pricing is high. I'm using a student license, however, I know that even this license is very expensive. I've tried to have this product in our organization, however, it's quite expensive. We don't have the internal budget.

If you're looking for other kinds of data, for example, non-structured data, they could make it much easier to use this kind of data. Tableau could create other features just for data visualization and non-structured data. It's a beautiful solution when you've got frames and tables. It's structured. However, if you don't have this kind of information on the data, it's quite difficult to use Tableau. I would say that if you have any feature that opens the opportunity to work with non-structured data, it would be excellent. For example, we do end up creating a lot of word clouds. With unstructured data it just doesn't translate quite right.

If you could use non-structured data to count the frequency of important words to find which word is more important, for example, that would be useful. I don't see Tableau doing this - counting the frequency of important words in a specific kind of text. 

It would also be great if there was statistical modeling for non-structured data.

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it_user336630 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Admin at a real estate/law firm with 501-1,000 employees

I have not yet transitioned to Tableau Desktop 10.0, but I understand version 10.0 has functionality that allow users to perform cluster analysis. I am sure that I will be using this functionality frequently going forward.

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it_user161736 - PeerSpot reviewer
Industry Analyst at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Two major improvements that I would like to see:
- A better/quicker interface for formatting graphs and dashboards. The current design takes too much time and doesn't really allow for the same formatting to be applied globally across all of the visualization.
- Improved data formatting prior to visualization. I do know that some improvements are coming with the next major release - for instance, the ability to join data across disparate data source types (e.g. joining CSV and SQL Server DB) - but this is currently a major limitation.

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it_user150693 - PeerSpot reviewer
Developer with 501-1,000 employees

I would give it a perfect rating if it weren't for a few flaws and limits that make it slip off from perfection.

There are some weaknesses in the desktop tool that could be greatly improved, concerning the dashboard layout management and the initialization of parameters.

There are also some frustrating limitations in its data engine that sometimes make it hard to handle filtering and combining data from multiple data sources in the same dashboard. Hopefully such limitations are expected to be solved in the next upcoming release, version 10.

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it_user221823 - PeerSpot reviewer
Architect-Technology at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user416991 - PeerSpot reviewer
Tableau/Data Visualization Specialist, Reporting & Analytics at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

I’d like more data integration across data sources.

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it_user90408 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Intelligence Specialist with 5,001-10,000 employees

Tableau lacks a lot of ETL capabilities. Of course, it’s not the core of the product but it is the best tool for data discovery and really needs an ETL or data quality module inside of the suite. Enterprises have to use another tool (such as Alteryx, IBM DataStage or Talend Studio) in order to support some business needs. But this entails additional cost, maintenance, resources, etc.

Tableau will add a lot of capabilities for data blending, joins between different data source, etc., in its next version, Tableau 10.

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it_user158718 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Tableau Architect at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Dashboard Version Control, Report Bursting, More capabilities on maps.

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it_user94263 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Developer at a pharma/biotech company with 501-1,000 employees
It would like to see autosaving, embedded fonts and other options to improve the ease of dashboard layout. View full review »
JW
Global Head of Professional Services at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

From a downside perspective, some of the more advanced modeling techniques are actually fairly difficult to do. In addition, I just fundamentally disagree with the way you have to implement them because you can get incorrect answers in some cases.

One of the key challenges is that you never know whether it is how your developers developed it or whether it was the tool. We did find that once we got into more complex models, the ability to keep objects that should tally the same way but didn't became more and more difficult. That was probably the big thing for me. I don't know enough about how the tool was developed to know whether that was because they didn't follow a recommended practice. That was probably the number one thing that I found frustrating with it.

When we started to try and get into some very granular data sets that had some complex relationships in them, the performance on it degraded pretty quickly. It did degrade to such an extent that we couldn't use it. We had to change what we were trying to do and manage its scope so that we could get what we wanted out of it or reduce the scope of what we needed out of it. It doesn't have a database behind it, per se. So, while doing some of the more complicated things that you might otherwise do on a database, we started hitting some pretty significant challenges.

View full review »
HV
CEO at Bi Solutions S.A

The price could be better. The overall scalability can also be improved. I would like to see more machine learning components to do predictive analytics. It should be simple for our customers to use. Tableau should include an automated machine learning feature in the next release.

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it_user811167 - PeerSpot reviewer
SVP Technology at Tesco

They need to improve the bar chart position and width.

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it_user454167 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, Business Intelligence at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

I would love to see dynamic parameter values & radial distance recognition on other WMS maps.

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it_user366207 - PeerSpot reviewer
Partner at a tech services company

I need to be able to combine in a worksheet from different sources because the insights could be much more powerful. It is possible that the product can do this now, but it was not easily found.

An option to interrupt the process of loading of external data (like from Google Analytics) would be helpful. A few times, I had issues with interruption of the initial data loading process, when it took longer than the expected.

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it_user189633 - PeerSpot reviewer
Industry Analyst at a construction company
  • Improved predictive analytics. This part is still a bit missing and it'd be useful for the companies.
  • More advanced built-in statistical tools. Still a bit rough on defining trends.
  • More flexible "storyboard" worksheet implementation. For instance, having a summary where you can define the filters and worksheets in the storyboard, without having to define it sheet by sheet.
  • More easily customizable fonts and formatting. Today, it still requires some time. It would be great to implement a "copy format" function.
View full review »
it_user125886 - PeerSpot reviewer
VP Strategy, Global Delivery & Operations at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
  • Facility to add custom code to the dashboard will be helpful.
  • Custom SQL feature is not working as expected from the performance perspective. Irrelevant of the SQL, the engine executes for everything available.
  • Archive historical data using extracts
  • MeasureName filter can’t be shared across multiple sheets in a dashboard.
  • Cascading with relative has restrictions over the worksheets in a dashboard.
  • Multiple selection in parameters
  • Formatting option for individual filter is not available.
  • Using HiveServer2 connector is a big challenge to pull, even with smaller data sets. Not sure if that has been improved with Spark Thrift server connector.
  • Not much support for Hadoop / Hive as the backend in the market, connectivity issues not limited to the drivers.
  • Few complex report requirements (for dashboards) could not be achieved with better performance (e.g. Dynamic Parameters).
  • Reverse engineering from the front end report is not that impressive.
  • For massive volumes of data, the performance acutely degrades.
  • Permitting external users with no SSO is still a concern.
  • Server support on Linux is lacking.
  • Caps on report scheduling
View full review »
it_user243885 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Intelligence Analyst at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees

Minor issues only. My biggest one is control over the order in which filters and sorts are applied. There is some control of this but not enough.

View full review »
JC
Educator at a university with 51-200 employees

In the next release, there should be more information describing each chart because users have a difficult time telling them apart. They should also include the animations/videos, similar to Power BI.

I also think that the trial period should be extended. It is currently only twenty-one days which is a short amount of time to get acquainted with the solution.

View full review »
ONUR ÇALISKAN - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing Partner at INFOLOJIK

The development part should be better. We are putting a lot of effort in during development, so if we face any struggles, we have to find workaround solutions on the internet. It would be nice to have new workaround solutions and other options. Every customer has different expectations, so sometimes it's hard to find the right solution.

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DR
Presidente at EDR

A strict security measure is needed. I believe it is weak in terms of security.

View full review »
NK
Delivery Lead at UST

The customization in the front end is a bit difficult. If they provide any utility or UI feature, where a user can do their own customization it would be great.

I would like to see an option to customize your own reports. Not being able to customize is a pain point for the developers.

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it_user984828 - PeerSpot reviewer
ACS/OPS at Delta Air Lines, Inc.

Their training. I've been looking for ways in which we can start training more people to it, and it has shown that other platforms have more access to training than Tableau. 

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it_user720510 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consulting Head

All area where business insight is needed. Also, I would like to see improvement in server capacities.

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it_user145740 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Expansion of number of visualisations, as well as potential for straight to dashboard function, rather than design individual visualisation – these are, however, genuinely not priority to amend.

Having used another software for a reasonable period of time, I wonder about the chances of incorporating other languages, such as d3.js in future releases (NB I'm still using 8.3)

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it_user149223 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Engineer, Big-Data/Data-Warehousing at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees

A simple mode for new/occasional users might be helpful. Occasional users will always have trouble coping with such a feature-rich product. Unless you are using it every day, and it is crucial for at least part of your job, the learning curve never flattens out. A simpler "mode" which removes many of the more complex features or just hides them in tool "ribbons" might present a less-daunting interface to aid adoption by the vast majority of users.

View full review »
it_user425556 - PeerSpot reviewer
VP at EON group
  • Korean geographic map at the detail level
  • Polygon map is a hot requirement from end users

Korean users want the Tableau default map function to be one more detailed level
when they would visualize Korean territories.
----------------
Country : South Korea
Great area(OOO-do) : Seoul city, Busan city, KyungKi-do, Chungchung-do,...
County(XXX-gu): Mapo-gu, Seocho-gu,.Gangnam-gu these are covered by Tableau 10.

It needs more detailed level (GGG-dong) that is Seocho-dong, Minrak-dong, Woomyun-dong as these are not covered yet.

View full review »
it_user231165 - PeerSpot reviewer
Deputy Director, Global Sales Planning & Policy at a renewables & environment company with 10,001+ employees

I would say they could improve the data blending within the desktop version. Ideally, it is better to be done on the server, but for small businesses (or company divisions), the server is not an option due to cost.

For the China market, I would encourage them to offer a license below $1,000 per year.

View full review »
it_user257478 - PeerSpot reviewer
Performance Management Analyst at a local government with 1,001-5,000 employees

There are a couple of areas where I’d like to see improvement. One: in creating visual templates so that the vizzes can be standardized with our fonts/layouts/colours. As more analysts are starting to work with Tableau, it is becoming harder to maintain some of the visual standards. Being able to have more control over the layout of sheets on a dashboard would also be helpful. Two: we use a lot of statistical formulae in our work to determine standard deviations, percentiles, etc. Currently I’m working on a project where those SDs had to be pre-calculated in order to create a funnel plot correctly. I’m not exactly sure how we could have done this in Tableau directly without being able to create custom functions.

One tiny thing ... being able to have no colour for a mark would help hide marks you can’t exclude in other ways. Yes, sometimes we have to trick Tableau to do what we need to do ;)

Oh, and one more thing ... we’d love to see more Canada-specific map details built in ... things like health authorities, postal code areas, etc. Creating custom background maps is not easy.

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it_user361425 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
  • Enterprise deployment
  • Prompting features
  • Writeback to tables

I’d like to see extraction after publishing.

View full review »
it_user357498 - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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.

View full review »
it_user421155 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Engineer - QlikView/Qlik Sense at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

It needs to allow for more complexity in data joins and creation. It needs to allow for designers to create objects together on one page instead of each object having its own page before then bringing them all together. They need to offer a personal (i.e., free) edition.

View full review »
JD
Expert Analyst at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

View full review »
AU
Senior Data Analyst at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

When compared to Power BI, it is less user-friendly.

The interface needs a major overhaul.

View full review »
AM
General Surgeon at a healthcare company with 51-200 employees

Some of the functionality of the dashboard can be difficult to operate and the color pallets are limited. They need to improve the icons and the filters, because they look too old, resembling Excel from 1997. It would be helpful if the solution was less difficult to use.

View full review »
HM
Performance and Business Intelligence Specialist at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

All of the BI tools have graphical interfaces but when it comes to the learning environment, not every tool has everything. To be the best in the market, Tableau has to improve its user interface and also look into developing implementing the best machine learning algorithms.

Including data storage capabilities would be helpful.

During the data crunching phase, it takes time for Tableau to connect, integrate, and download the data. In general, it takes a lot of time for the ETL process.

Increasing the trial period to six months would allow people to better learn and assess the tool to determine whether it suits their needs.

Given the price of BI tools, Tableau should consider giving a scholarship to people so that they can learn how to work with the tool. It would be helping some of the people who lost their jobs during this pandemic. If the users learn and become certified on Tableau, it would help to get more people interested in the tool.

View full review »
PM
Operations Manager at iWantGreatCare

The cost of the solution should be improved.

Reports should be downloadable as PDF files. Emails containing images of dashboards can  be scheduled, but there is still demand for creating printable PDF snapshot views of dashboards. UPDATE - In fairness to Tableau, with the right design, dashboards that are downloadable can be created ad-hoc.

View full review »
Saumya Jain - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Manager at TCG Digital Solutions Private Limited

The solution requires a lot of user training before reports can be created. That can make things difficult and require us to have Tableau specialists. It's difficult for a newbie to start developing reports. 

Tableau queries and analytics, as well as development could be improved. The solution could also include an option to incorporate more open source libraries. I know Tableau has this closed loop so they might not want to provide that but if they did have integration capabilities with open-source libraries, I think that would be great. 

View full review »
AG
Business Intelligence Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

While noted that the product is specifically designed for visualization, it would be the perfect tool if it had more ETL features.

View full review »
it_user639489 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Risk Manager at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Improvement is required in the way filters operate when applied on large data sets. Having the ability to select and deselect filters without having to retrace the original path would make it easier to demonstrate the results.

View full review »
it_user151629 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Expert at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

At the organizational level, increasing the servers' capabilities to support us as an enterprise tool: data management, semantic layer, and integration with other collaboration tools. At the analyst level: Better connection with Python data frames.

View full review »
it_user286257 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Analytics at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

I’d like to see a better ETL preparation engine.

View full review »
it_user265299 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Engineer Business Intelligence with 10,001+ employees

Tableau comes out with one major release every year and minor releases frequently, which is very good. Also, most of the changes are done based on the ideas posted on the community, which means it listens to the user base to come up with the changes, which is phenomenal.

As far as the changes I would like to see, they could improve performance with respect to big data connections and cube data sources. Many users in my organization feel that Tableau is great with RDBMS, but with Hadoop or cube data sources, the performance is not so great.

View full review »
it_user239409 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Analyst at a government with 501-1,000 employees

I would like to see more Excel-like functionalities, perhaps, e.g. the countifs function. It is quite a hassle to code this using query language.

View full review »
it_user92844 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at a tech services company

With the Device Manager in Tableau 10, you can design, customize, and publish a single dashboard with optimized views for tablets and phones.

Other features include clustering segmentation data and a custom territories map.

View full review »
it_user372978 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Intelligence Director at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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.

View full review »
it_user1245 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
• Unlike Tableau, QlikView is a powerful, agile platform. • Lack of shortcuts – no controls such as dials or gauges which are generally find with dashboard • Poor Performance in hierarchical data– this is an usability problems when filtering as it doesn’t recognise the hierarchy. You can’t clear all filters enabling the user to start again when using complex filters • Unable to link parameters View full review »
AC
Project Manager at a government with 51-200 employees

There should be more GIS features, such as location analysis, which is quite limited. There are very few location-based functionalities.

I currently have to use another Tableau solution that allows me to combine different data sources and do the data cleaning. I think they should combine these solutions together.

View full review »
MN
BI Solution Engineer at DataSelf

The charting is overly complex in comparison with Power BI's

The calculations are harder, as the focus is on a little level of detail instead of on making a column. Power BI and Tableau are a bit more detailed when it comes to creating calculations. It's not possible to merely add two columns together, but there is a need to build a calculation. Simply put, calculations can be a little more complex in Tableau. I'd like to see the ability just to add and subtract columns, to make it like a wizard.

View full review »
SM
Senior Software Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

This solution has some features which really needs to be improved. For example, the sorting feature, If we compare it with ClixSense, ClixSense has a direct sorting feature available to users. Wherein Tableau, we have to go and create a parameter, make it dynamic, force users to click somewhere else on the filter, and then maybe you can sort it. Tableau is really new for sorting features.

With performance tuning, it generates a pretty complex query when it is not required. We do not actually write 100 lines of code for a single KPI indicator. What we do is run the performance tuning model which will give 100-200 lines of code for a single KPI. That is not exactly an optimized query. While running performance tuning on the query, it should be pretty optimized, but it does not seem to be doing this.

View full review »
LG
Project Development Coordinator at ALIMENTOS ITALIA

To improve the next version, it is important to highlight the use of the tool in other languages. This includes internal handling and updates.

View full review »
it_user851040 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Operations Support Leader at General Electric

Needs bursting email and export to Excel. Many users still need to download the information (to Excel) and export to an Excel macro to merge the info with some other info. 

Bursting email is also needed to deliver the reports to many people in their inboxes and this functionality is not provided by Tableau.

View full review »
it_user185988 - PeerSpot reviewer
Delivery Planning & Implementation at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees

There is still room to improve visualization when more than two dimensions are synchronized. Sometimes when you need to use more than one measurement from 2 different data sources, you won't be able to show the values.

Also it would be nice if it was possible to have more than one type of maks used on a single sheet, e.g. use trafic light together with text.

View full review »
it_user332121 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Marketing Manager, CRM at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Share-ability. If your audience isn’t using Tableau, getting them to see and use the insights can be challenging. Tableau’s approach to communicating information around data is great, but it requires a shift in how you communicate it and they purposefully don’t make it easy to share via traditional methods (e.g. PPT).

View full review »
it_user236448 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Admin at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees

They can improve the integration of SAP BW (join between elements) and Tableau Server platform, better adaptation for tablets and cellphone by the application and organize displays more efficiently.

View full review »
it_user120990 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager - CRO at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees
  • Better dashboard creation
  • Ease of making reports
View full review »
DH
QA Manager at Tandicorp

Part graphical gauges compliance does not include the Balance Score Card style, however you can develop these graphics, another shortcoming in not having mondrian engines.

View full review »
KB
Managing Partner at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Tableau's automatic insight could be improved. It has some predefined capabilities to understand the data, but I think they need more. Customers need more insight automatically from data—they don't want to discover them, they want to get the forecast automatically. 

The data preparation should also be improved because it's not easy. 

Tableau tries to focus on the business side, but the backend side has not improved much. They also have an ETS solution, but it's limited. 

View full review »
it_user195087 - PeerSpot reviewer
EMEA Business Operations Analyst at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

It over-uses custom calculations to do simple format and other changes. This is time consuming, compared to the actual chart making and holds up the enjoyable process of data discovery.

View full review »
it_user278760 - PeerSpot reviewer
Portfolio Analyst at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees
  • Better integration with R. Currently, users need to start R before running R scripts in Tableau. Ideally, it would be great if Tableau could save the step of firing up R to start with.
  • Introducing more quite-common advanced analytics functions in Tableau. To enable users to perform simple advanced analytics at their fingertips.
View full review »
it_user348144 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Specialist at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Its server lacks traditional BI solution capabilities such as job scheduling, HA and etc. If you want to roll out it as an enterprise-wide application, you must consider many usage scenarios and operation-level items. Tableau has a robust design UI and presentation layer, but lacks many of the capabilities of an enterprise BI solution. We have been using the SAP BO BI solution for many years. We feel Tableau Server still has a long way to go.

View full review »
MK
Consultant at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

It would be nice to be able to use the reports as a data source. Calculations in reports are still tricky.

View full review »
it_user280683 - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder, Director, Srinivasan Software Solutions Pvt., Ltd. at a tech vendor

Some features where the product can improve are:

  • It can be cost prohibitive.
  • Little change management issues
  • There is no functionality for scheduling and reports notification
  • Needs the ability to build complicated reports
  • Risky security and permissions
View full review »
it_user326526 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Business Analyst at a logistics company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Enhance standard reporting like QlikView (scheduled reports, notifications etc.); for MNCs, the server version license is not cheap; and row-level security: every user needs a DB account, which can give a hacker more opportunity to attack via more DB accounts.

View full review »
it_user163317 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Admin at a tech company with 51-200 employees
There are many things that users want Tableau to improve:
  • Multiple choice for filter selection. This is a very big shortcoming.
  • Dynamic parameters.
  • Currently, it cannot aggregate further on a measure that has been aggregated already
  • A button function for dashboards. Sometimes, we need a button to link to another dashboard.
  • Display/hide an object based on a parameter as a real function, not using tricks. You can do it using tricks, but it looks so ugly.
View full review »
it_user168822 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director with 501-1,000 employees

ETL functionality is limited, which is both a strength & weakness. It would be nice to have Alteryx & Tableau as a package, but I believe Tableau have deliberately stayed out of the "deep" ETL capabilities to "stick to the knitting", which they have done very well.

View full review »
ED
Founder, CEO, & President at Krystal Sekurity
  • Faster implementation
  • Processing speed
View full review »
it_user211788 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Consultant at a consultancy with 51-200 employees

It's hard to say right now but I can see challenges ahead as the market share and common standards become an issue - if the goal is to replace Excel, then it will be a winner-takes-all type of battle. For clients this may make them delay purchase and adoption.

View full review »
it_user176937 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oracle OBIEE v12.x, v11.x SME Administrator at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees
  • Difficulty when moving 'outside of the norm' where 'workarounds' are needed
  • Difficult if you want to present reports as numbers and tables
  • Free version only available for educational users but not for consultants working in many organizations (and could therefore be introduced to it).
View full review »
it_user150654 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant with 501-1,000 employees
As with all products there are many areas that can be improved. Tableau actively encourages suggestions from its user community, allowing for voting on what features to include it future releases. http://community.tableausoftware.com/community/idea View full review »
it_user722229 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Instructor at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

Integration with big data platform is a plus for any BI tool. They need to perform ETL/ELT operations with a direct connect to Hadoop ecosystem and RStudio for data quality tasks or offer a similar features.

View full review »
it_user152976 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Intelligence Analyst at a university with 501-1,000 employees

Tableau development has an increasingly large learning curve. It is marketed as an upper management tool that anyone can dive into. However, trying to develop even simple tables within Tableau is an exercise in frustration and patience. The end results cannot be denied, but the path to getting there is not for the lighthearted.

View full review »
it_user244824 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Knowledge Analyst - Advanced Analytics at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

Data preparation and joining different data sources is still not very intuitive and could be improved.

View full review »
it_user241104 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
  • 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.
View full review »
it_user163569 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer-Product Development with 5,001-10,000 employees

ETL functionality to be incorporated and Server to be improved in terms of including more features in Web Authoring, Quick steps in replacing data source connection credentials etc.

View full review »
FW
Business Intelligence at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

In the last year, I haven't really used Tableau much. Therefore, I don't really know what new features there are currently or if there are fixes or improvements that have occurred in the last year.

Maybe the price could be a bit cheaper, especially if you're a personal developer that uses Tableau just to explore smaller data sets and you're not a company or something like that. Specifically for learning purposes, it could be cheaper. I know there is a student license, however, there could be a cheaper option for people who are maybe just starting to explore data and to use data visualization tools. 

View full review »
AB
DATA STRATEGY at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The attention we receive from the partner manager would be an issue for us. The use case to have them is a bit niche. Not everyone wants a cookie-cutter analysis and it ends up being plain and not very specific. It's nice sometimes to do that. The expert analysts work on the solution once or twice or three times, and they get to a final dashboard. However, if you use a Tableau final dashboard, you can feel that it was not designed to just be used as a dashboard. Playing with that dashboard is not the end-game. It is not the final objective. 

There are two types of users. There are those that are smart and proactive and constantly discovering new cases. Those are the ones that will benefit from Tableau. The others tend to just want to use dashboards, and they won't get as much out of the experience.

The data entered into Tableau must be clean. Otherwise, it won't work properly.

The support for vendors could be a bit better. There isn't much helpful communication happening.

View full review »
it_user512082 - PeerSpot reviewer
ProductEngineer with 51-200 employees

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.

View full review »
it_user296670 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Programmer Analyst at a construction company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

View full review »
it_user153378 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

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.

View full review »
SR
Data Analyst at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

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.

View full review »
PA
Research & Development Expert at a energy/utilities company with 11-50 employees

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.

View full review »
it_user147069 - PeerSpot reviewer
Tableau Lead with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • 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
View full review »
it_user193389 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

View full review »
it_user68187 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a tech consulting company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

View full review »
it_user261888 - PeerSpot reviewer
Analyst at a consultancy with 51-200 employees

The feature I would like to have is publication of a live dashboard on a webpage, so that dashboards can be incorporated in webpages. We can do this currently on Tableau public but because of data security, we need the dashboards to be private. But in private dashboards, we cannot publish it on webpages. Sisense provides this feature.

View full review »
it_user90192 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager with 1,001-5,000 employees

They need to make it more flexible for enterprise administration, e.g, more job scheduling flexibility, more robust permission control, and more comprehensive mapping service that is native and not dependent on a third party like Mapbox. They also need to develop more comprehensive DR and HA solutions.

View full review »
it_user410031 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Analytics Specialist at a tech consulting company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Governed data discovery
  • Collaboration
  • Other enterprise features
View full review »
it_user400395 - PeerSpot reviewer
Planning Specialist at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees

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.

View full review »
VP
Service Delivery Manager / Architect at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Scalability for large amounts of data needs improvement, as well as its performance.

From a scheduling perspective, if there is a sync up of the desktop dashboard into the server that we can publish as a web version, in an accessible way, that publishing scales and keeps on executing for hours. This can go on for eight to nine hours, but you have no indicator, you don't even see that it is processing. For example, there is no spinning wheel and all I see is a black screen.

The interface can be improved, in part because there is no indication that something is running or that it's processing. I would like to have some kind of indication that there is something processing on the interface.

Technical support could be faster or if they have any limitations of the product, they should openly communicate it. They could also just tell you that this product is intended for small volumes of data and may even suggest another solution.

View full review »
it_user845916 - PeerSpot reviewer
MEA Sales Director at DR at ComNavy
  • Needs more ETL capabilities, to be able to address the end-to-end BI need. 
  • The ability to use it on MAC machines. As far as I know, this is not possible.
View full review »
KD
Solutions Engineer at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

The solution is integrated reasonably well but I'd like to see some custom connectors and more integration with different platforms. 

View full review »
it_user563166 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Intelligence Manager at a non-tech company with 10,001+ employees

Sometimes, when the KPIs or metrics are kind of complex, Tableau could slowdown in the timing of the process and respond (clicks).

View full review »
it_user261768 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager - Analytics at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Number of out-of-box visualizations can be increased.

View full review »
it_user139296 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It is not scalable at the enterprise level. Performance degraded massively when we scaled up backend data.

They have not developed a feature to re-use components.

View full review »
it_user354975 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Database Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

I would like to see them add new charts, especially gauges, which are unfortunately not currently available in Tableau.

View full review »
it_user136791 - PeerSpot reviewer
CRM Manager at a marketing services firm with 51-200 employees
Include new graph views in Tableau, increase dual axis - sync of only two axis isn't enough. View full review »
it_user6582 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Development Staff at a media company with 51-200 employees
Price is not cheap...not awful though. (That's why it gets 5 stars.) View full review »
VS
Lead Data Scientist at a financial services firm with 11-50 employees

It will be good if the server could be more stable, and I would like to have the technical service to be more reliable. 

I would like a better response time without having to wait for a week just to get feedback.

View full review »
it_user521664 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager
  • Consultant engagement
  • Margin analysis 
  • Project break-even point (analysis of the project)
  • SLE of projects
View full review »
it_user347076 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at a tech company with 51-200 employees

I would love to see some easier ways for predictive analysis or machine learning in Tableau. The only way to do it at the moment is manually and with the integration of other tools. I’m used to everything being fast and easy in Tableau and I think that can be a significant upgrade.

View full review »
it_user6210 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Expert at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
The Tableau server piece isn't as mature but it getting better with time. I think they are missing a Power User setting in the administration/monitoring tools that will allow people to see what's going on with the server, extract refreshes, etc...without having full admin access.It's expensive to use at an enterprise level. Performance can be tricky on large datasets (>10 or 20M records). Tableau can handle the large volume, but what/how you use the features in the viz can have significant impact on how snappy the viz is for end-users. View full review »
it_user879756 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, Data-Driven Innovation with 201-500 employees

We would much appreciate an option for copying/moving objects between different pages and a possibility for teamwork when working on the same dashboards.

View full review »
it_user187248 - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Manager at a pharma/biotech company

I feel Tableau didn't cater to each and every requirement within the team. For example, we have an SSAS cube and I don't remember that I could connect that in Tableau. Maybe in the latest version this has been taken care of.

View full review »
JM
Data Analyst at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

I'd like to see a greater ability for customization because there are certain things that are lacking in that area. 

View full review »
it_user449397 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Intelligence Specialist
  1. About Tableau Server, it has to access various OS, not only Windows' server.
  2. When extracting data, it can perform tasks about the update.
  3. Needs tuning for slow work blending technology between dissimilar systems.
View full review »
it_user284769 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Visualization and BI Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

It should allow user-defined functions. There are several ideas logged by various Tableau developers in the community and they should implement those ideas as soon as they can.

View full review »
it_user243900 - PeerSpot reviewer
Web Administrator at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

The integration and usage of multiple data sources is sometimes not that straightforward.

View full review »
it_user339261 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Admin at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees
  • Not browser independent
  • Sometimes, data retrieval was slow

I had a bad experience viewing the reports with Microsoft IE or Chrome. The version well supported the Mozilla Firefox version. The browser showed no response when it was fetching the data or executing a report based on dynamic data.

This is just an observation. I predominantly used Chrome browser for viewing dashboards using Tableau.

View full review »
JF
Founder at a tech services company with self employed

When I've done presentations in the past, I've had issues with uploading the cartography.

View full review »
it_user173613 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology Lead at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

More visualizations can be added.

Real-time reporting capabilities can be improved.

View full review »
it_user494052 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI & Digital Transformation Consultant at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

- HA feature is missing
- Better scalability

View full review »
it_user397626 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Analyst at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

With Tableau, use of an external ETL tool is a must if it’s connected to a data warehouse. It doesn’t really provide the room for complex computing or data transformation.

View full review »
it_user337086 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Analyst at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees
It has some shortcomings:
  • Not very well-made dashboard designing
  • Lack of formatting options
  • Sometimes, not enough operating speed while working with huge amount of data
  • In the next version, I would like to see more formatting options and an improvement in overall performance.
View full review »
it_user409698 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Analyst at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees

I would really like to import data from any online website to make it dynamic.

I would like them to also extend the trial version to 30 days to encourage more people to use it and understand it more. Like an addiction, when you use something for a long time, it becomes a habit. :)

View full review »
it_user349221 - PeerSpot reviewer
GSDC Consultant at a consultancy

Add calculated columns in the edit text box like in Spotfire.

View full review »
it_user570318 - PeerSpot reviewer
‎R&D Manager at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Custom formatting and layout.

View full review »
it_user123252 - PeerSpot reviewer
Tableau Specialist, BI and ETL Developer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

We would like to see more advanced data science capabilities like predictive analysis and advanced linear regression.

Tableau also lacks native financial functions. Also, we would like to see integration with native Hadoop and some standard reporting capabilities beyond the dashboard.

View full review »
it_user823482 - PeerSpot reviewer
Analysis Manager at a educational organization with 51-200 employees

If they could add global filters in the stories, more chart types, and default colours, it would help.    

View full review »
AM
Senior BI Developer at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
  • Scripting just as loops would be great. 
  • Forecasting on table calculation fields.
View full review »
it_user170457 - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Manager - Solution Consulting at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

Real-time interactions need more attention. Predictive analytics capability should be increased.

View full review »
it_user82608 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at a tech company with 51-200 employees
It is meant as a visualization tool agreed, but some basic ETL functionality will do a world of good. Also, enterprise collaboration and embedded analytics (like Spotfire) would be great View full review »
it_user823452 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Provide additional enhancements in any business process: Operations, Marketing and Sales, Finance, Human Resources, Logistics, etc.

View full review »
it_user690216 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI & New Project Profesional at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

Preparation and consolidation of data. Many organizations needs prepare data, changes formats or consolidate sources. ETL jobs waste a lot time and sometimes is unproductive.

View full review »
Buyer's Guide
Tableau
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Tableau. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.