Tableau

I have worked on domains like Telecom and Network where in I have been using Tableau. Its really liked by senior management as it shows each and every bit very clearly to relevant stake holders. For example, Marketing head likes region wise revenue sale dashboard which gives region/sales manager/product wise sale.

Puntos a favor

There are many features which lot of users would have liked:-
1. Connection to almost all database
2. Many types of Charts can be created including Sankey, Doughnut, Maps etc.
3. Its has the feature of data blending and data extraction
4. Dashboards can be viewed on multiple devices like tablet, mobile and laptops.
5. Its really fast while drilling down or filtering out from any dashboard.

Puntos en contra

Its a bit expensive tool as compared to other data visualization tools however its a value for money.

I started using it while I was making my MBA and I was amazed at the easy of use and the possibility to make chart in a very powerful way beyond excel. Later on, when I was asked to do some complex representation of many parameters, Tableau has been the best and easiest option, beyond other 3 options I have tried from major sellers

Puntos a favor

- Very intuitive way o assemble data, no need for programming or special commands
- Easily change data from numeric to alphanumeric
- The most common and useful charts are available
- Easy to breakdown data into several clusters
- I once plotted 6 parameters in a 2 dimensional chart: X, Y, bubble size, color, name, icon
- You can build special read-only docs with the functionality to be read by Tableu Reader (as in acrobat reader)
- You can customize label, axis, trend and references lines

Puntos en contra

- Eventually some very specific charts are not there as chord, tornado, tree maps, nodes, gauges, alluvial diagram, dendograms
- Even with all the clustering, it lacks statistical analysis as Anova, hypothesis test between two set of data, normal probability plot

I've been using the software for about five years and it has been able to provide insight into our data in a way that no other tool has been able to. However, support is terrible for this product and some of the versions are released with a few bugs. We will likely continue to this but it is imperfect.

Puntos a favor

The software is very powerful tool and excellent visualization tool. It is easy to get started and there is a ton of free training available. The pool of users is great and the community is very helpful to new and existing users.

Puntos en contra

The support we pay for is almost worthless. We frequently solve the problem ourselves and it is time consuming to submit everything via their helpdesk with nothing to show for it. Providing logs and files and emailing with someone on the west coast outside of normal east coast business hours is frustrating. Tickets get "escalated" to the engineering team and that ends up being code for "we don't know and this won't be fixed by us". Turnover for their sales representatives indicates it isn't a great company to work for either.

My overall experience with Tableau was satisfactory because it met my core business need of visualizing the KPIs in a way that my partner and I can measure if our campaigns are successful or not. If additional technical support is provided by Salesforce and Tableau teams to integrate the data, then its value will increase further. If a cheaper license is provided for small businesses, it will help lift improve its ROI. Tableau training was super helpful to me in grasping its user interface. So, continue to offer hands-on-tutorials.

Puntos a favor

I use Tableau to create marketing campaign dashboards so my partner and I can visually see how our business KPIs are trending. I connect Google Analytics to Tableau and try to create more holistic views of our success metrics and try to compare them to industry benchmarks. For example, i compare how my e-commerce website conversion rate is trending during a particular season with industry conversion rates for similar products. I also try to integrate other data sources such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud or Datorama with Tableau. This allows us to see both quantitative and qualitative data of our customers in the same report. And, helps us understand if higher conversion rate is correlated to higher customer engagement and satisfaction.

Puntos en contra

When integrating Tableau with Salesforce, we had to hire Salesforce consultants because it involved writing SQL code. Additionally, when exporting reports from Tableau, I had to spend lot of time formatting the font size or color so subsequent reports looked consistent. To add data from Salesforce Marketing Cloud, I had to follow a manual process of exporting data in Excel and then integrating it into Tableau. Because the integration of Salesforce was not as smooth as Google Analytics. Finally, Tableau license is expensive for small business owners compared to other dashboard tools.

It is one of the grate tool that is saving my bunch of time. I can utilize more timings to make attractive visualizations rather than spending time in Organizing and Cleaning of data, It has everything like calculations, Maps, Filters and lot more very cool functions.

Puntos a favor

So Easy to Clean and Reorganize data , data cleaning takes forever via database or Excel, Tableau makes it easy to load and clean before its ready for analysis

Puntos en contra

Takes to much time at first load or update large amount of data. Once it load successfully then you are good to go