The Tableau BI software solution is one that can be used by anyone who needs conduct analysis on critical business data, regardless of whether their role is as an executive or manager. Tableau aims to provide analysis that is both insightful and actionable. Most users can be up and running in less than hour, using the “ShowMe” function to quickly produce visualizations based on fields selected by the user.

The company took the time to build best practices into the system to make sure users produce digestible information that is both meaningful and focused. This Stanford-developed solution includes design templates that are both eye-catching and effective. Users can simply drag-and-drop to get an analysis going, and subsequent changes occur in real-time to follow your train of thought. Bringing in additional data can happen with a single click, and sharing reports is nearly as easy by publishing them to the web without making changes to the dashboard. This is a web-based solution that can be accessed through a variety of devices. As long as you have a web browser handy, you can analyze data through Tableau. Support comes in the form of live and/or on-demand training, along with online support documents.

Pros

When’s the last time you heard anyone say that data management was “fun?” More than one user has described Tableau’s ease of use in those terms. Any BI solution that users say actually makes data management fun is probably worth a second look! Nearly all users are very satisfied with both how easy it is to use as well as the quality of the output, and how easy it is to share that output. Users also highlight the variability in visualization options, going beyond standard bar graphs, line graphs, and pie charts to more exciting options such as Bubble, Heat map, Treemap, and Box-and-whisker plots.

Cons

A few users have noted that they had data integration issues with some of their partners, which resulted in much longer-than-expected timeframes to fully utilize the software in the ways they wanted to use it. It’s worth checking in advance if those issues might apply to your company and its partners. Other users note that when your data sets become huge, the system begins to get much slower. A large percentage of users note that Tableau is difficult to learn. These users say there is a significant amount of product-specific knowledge needed to take full advantage of the software, and that this takes time. Lacking a teacher or very specific instructions, it’s hard for some users to get very far with it on their own. They also note that the online training videos aren’t especially helpful or well done. Others have noted that your hardware needs to be up-to-speed. If you’re on anything less than Windows 64-bit and 4GB of memory, you’ll probably encounter frequent crashes of the system, especially with large data sets.

Although the Tableau BI software solution is ranked by users as easy to use once you learn it (which is described as difficult) and that the output is top-notch, there do seem to be issues around slowness with larger data sets, as well as potential data integration issues.