Tableau is a business intelligence tool that allows people to quickly and easily create intuitive user interfaces for uncovering insights from data in the form of a visual manner, maybe a graph, report, etc. But more than a chart builder, Tableau also supports data blending, predictive analysis, forecasts, and more.
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1. What Is Tableau?
Tableau is an integrated BI and analytics tool that helps to analyze key business data and generate meaningful insights. The tool allows users to collect data from multiple sources such as SQL databases, spreadsheets, and cloud apps like Google Analytics and Salesforce to create a collective dataset. Tableau's live visual analytics and interactive dashboard allow slicing & dicing datasets for generating relevant insights and exploring new opportunities. Tableau helps to create a narrative story of the data analysis with interactive visualizations that can be shared within the organization.
2. Why Is It popular?
User-friendly: Tableau contains features for cleansing, organizing, and displaying data, making it simpler to build dashboards for interactive visual analytics with few complicated formulas. These dashboards make it easier for non-technical analysts and end-users to convert data into understandable ones.
Easily share dashboards: The dashboard can be distributed live on the stage from which the client gets to it. The results may also be presented in real-time.
Multiple data source connections: The tool supports establishing connections with several data sources, enhancing the quality of data analysis and enabling an integrated, instructive dashboard. Live connections with your data ensure you always view the latest and greatest.
Thriving community and forum: The number of Tableau users who actively contribute their skills and attitude to the network keeps growing. Business clients can broaden their understanding of data processing and detail and gain useful information in this network. Additionally, participants are ready to offer their knowledge and assist in resolving client concerns.
3. Tableau Highlight Features
Predictive analysis and forecast: Creating trend lines and forecasts is straightforward with Tableau’s powerful backend and dynamic front end. To acquire data predictions such as a forecast or a trend line, pick particular parameters and drag-and-drop operations employing your concerned fields.
Data blending: Data blending is the most important feature in Tableau. It is used when we combine related data from multiple data sources, which you want to analyze together in a single view, and represent in the form of a graph.
Real-time analysis: Makes users able to quickly understand and analyze dynamic data. Tableau can help extract valuable information from fast-moving data with interactive analytics.
Interactive visualizations: Tableau has the capacity to make progressively delightful Data representation types. It produces appealing and practical representations that will help the client in making a decision.
4. Tableau Pricing Plan
Tableau pricing plans categorized their user using three plans such as Tableau Creator, Tableau Explorer, and Tableau Viewer. Additionally, there are two hosting options available: Tableau Server and Tableau Cloud, which have minimal differences in price.
5. Tableau Limitations
Less chart capacity: Tableau is one of the favourite tools in the BI industry, with its appealing visualization capabilities. However, there are 24 different types of charts available in Tableau. This number is still relatively small for a powerful tool compared to the tools on the market.
Did you know? Rocket.BI from Data Insider provides 36 charts to meet all user needs in data visualisation. Users can efficiently perform drag-and-drop actions to create charts and fully customisable informative reports. Data Insider also offers a wide range of settings options with ease of use and flexibility, easy to change.
Limited data exploration: Tableau is not meant for native connections to large datasets, limiting the data that can be explored. You must have SQL knowledge to create complicated datasets from multiple data sources.
Static and single-value parameters: Tableau’s parameters are static, and a single value can be selected using a parameter. These parameters need to be manually updated each time the data is modified.
Not a robust ETL tool: Tableau’s strong suit is data visualization, not transformation and joining.
6. Conclusion
In the article, we have covered a brief overview of Tableau, its features, pricing plan, advantages, and disadvantages. Tableau continuously expands the range of features and updates to provide real and meaningful insights from data. It also comes with a very easy drag-drop interface that makes it easy to learn and in creating compelling, interactive dashboard-style reports. We hope this article will help you in your data analyst journey.
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Alternatives
Tableau is a powerful visual analytics tool for individuals and organisations to maximise their data and develop interactive dashboards. But, Tableau may not work for every company. There are plenty of BI software and reporting tools on the market that fulfills your need beside Tableau:
Data Insider Rocket.BI: Rocket.BI is a good alternative to Tableau as it is also a powerful self-service business intelligence solution of Data Insider specifically designed for analytical databases. However, it offers a better comprehensive self-service capability and performs advanced data analysis, ad hoc, and more. See us introducing Rocket.BI
Google Looker Studio is a free tool that turns your data into informative, easy-to-read, easy-to-share, and fully customizable dashboards and reports. See our article about An Overview of Google Looker Studio
Power BI is a business intelligence platform that provides non-technical business users with the means to gather, analyze, visualize, and share data. It transforms data into valuable business information relevant to all levels of the business. Here is an article about An Introduction to Microsoft Power BI
Domo is a cloud-based business intelligence and dashboard tool that helps businesses connect, prepare, visualize, engage, and optimize their data on a single platform. Its dashboard offers various pre-built pages that can self-organize depending on your data inputs. You can also use its card builder tool, which helps create custom visualizations via drag-and-drop.