One solution that certainly stands out in the market among the different data visualization products is Tableau Software. Tableau Software is one of the most fast-growing data visualization tools used in the Business Intelligence industry. It helps us to simplify the raw set of data into an easily understandable form without any technical skills and coding knowledge. It is rated as a leader for seven consecutive years by Gartner’s 2019 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms rates.
Let’s understand Tableau thoroughly.
What is Tableau?
Tableau is the swiftest-growing data visualization tool which helps you convert textual and numerical information to beautiful through interactive dashboards. It is the best way to change or transform the raw data into easily understandable data. Tableau is so popular, interactive, simple, fast and user-friendly and has a huge fan base in public and enterprise world. The great thing about tableau is that it doesn’t need any technical or any kind of programming skills to operate. It has accumulated interest among the people across various sectors like different industries, business, and researchers.
Features of Tableau are:
- Real-time analysis
- Collaboration of data
- Data Blending
Why Learn Tableau?
Tableau is emerging as one of the hottest trends in business intelligence in 2019. It offers a multitude of benefits to companies that use it for their business analytics needs. Let’s discuss the pros and cons. There is a huge demand for Tableau experts also there are huge rewards on offer as well. The average salary for a Tableau developer is $75,401 as per Payscale. Also, top companies like Dell, General Motors, Sony Electronics, etc are looking for Tableau talent. So what are you waiting for? Many professionals are learning Tableau to up-skill themselves.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Tableau:
Before going into the details, let’s see the advantages and disadvantages of Tableau in a tabular form.
Tableau | Advantages | Disadvantages |
High Performance | Poor Versioning |
Mobile-Friendly | No automatic refreshing of reports |
Extensive customer resources | Need manual effort |
Excellent mobile support | Not a comprehensive solution |
Easy to upgrade | No version control |
Low cost | Requires SQL knowledge |
Quality Customer Service | - |
Ease of Use | - |
Advantages of Tableau:
1. High Performance:
Users rate Tableau’s overall performance as strong and secure. It can handle millions of rows of data with ease. The huge advantage of having Tableau is different types of visualization can be created at one shot.
2. Mobile-friendly:
There is an accomplished mobile app available for IOS and Android which adds mobility to Tableau users and allows them to keep statistics at their fingertips. The app supports practically that a desktop and online version has.
3. Extensive Customer Resources:
Tableau community is engaging and enthusiastic. It has various comprehensive online resources, guides, training, and online forums, etc.
4. Excellent Mobile Support:
Tableau has a huge percentage of users actively deploying mobile BI. It applies a lot of efforts in building a healthy mobile customer.
5. Easy to Upgrade:
Tableau customers are happy with using the latest release of the software because the upgrades are easy to be carried out.
6. Low Cost:
Tableau is relatively a low-cost solution compared to other big data counterparts such as Qlik and Business Objects.
7. Quality Customer Service:
Tableau has user and developer community where the queries are answered quickly.
8. Ease of Use:
It is easy to use since it is simple user interface software. Also, it is simple to drag and drop interface which is very easy to learn.
Disadvantages of Tableau
Tableau is the leader in the data viz space however, there are some limitations. Let's dive into some tableau limitations:
1. Poor Versioning
The main disadvantage of using Tableau is, only recent versions supports revision history and for the older one's package rolling back is not possible.
2. No Automatic Refreshing of Reports:
You don’t get an automatic option to refresh your reports with the help of scheduling. Therefore, some manual effort required to update the data in back-end.
3. Need Manual Effort:
Tableau’s parameters are inactive and only a single value can be selected using a parameter. You need to update it manually whenever the data gets change.
4. Not a Comprehensive Solution
Even if the Tableau Software is easy to use for BI application, still it doesn’t provide any platform for developing analytic applications that can be widely shared. Also, it doesn’t suit the business that has expanded deployments of broad business.
5. No Version Control:
Once the dashboards and reports are published on the server you can’t get back to the previous levels of data in Tableau. It is not possible to go back and recover old data.
6. SQL Knowledge
You need to have SQL knowledge in order to create rich and complex datasets from multiple data sources. A tableau is an excellent option for business users to play with the data once the dataset is created.
Despite some cons, the pros clearly outweigh the cons and Tableau is the most preferred choice for creating interactive data visualizations.
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