Why is Tableau used for data visualization?

Identifying the areas that need attention or improvement has become an essential part of any business process. However, it becomes quite tedious to detect factors that influence customer behavior and areas of improvement. Organizations need to act on data faster and more effectively to identify new business opportunities ahead of the market. They require the ability to access, evaluate, and comprehend their data to seek insights from them.

Tableau, a data visualization tool, offers new approaches to radically improve the ability to fetch hidden acumens. It leverages visual analytics that allows users to interact with data. By leveraging Tableau, users can visually interact with data to get insights faster and make critical decisions.

Audi, Bank of America, Amazon, Burger King, EY, and Kimberly-Clark Corporation are few of the top companies using Tableau. – Tableau

Tableau makes interacting with your data easy

Tableau is a very effective tool to create interactive data visualizations very quickly. It is very simple and user-friendly. Tableau can create complex graphs giving a similar feel as the pivot table graphs in Excel. Moreover, it can handle a lot more data and quickly provide calculations on datasets.

• Users can create visuals quickly and switch between types easily to find the model that best represents your message.
• Users can manage a huge amount of data.
• The user interface is well-organized which allows customizing the view with a few clicks.
• It is extremely easy to integrate with multiple data sources.
• It can create visualizations for a large amount of data without crashing.

It gives businesses the ability to perform fairly complex data visualization in a very intuitive, drag and drop manner.Data visualization by Tableau is remarkably interactive.

More than 70% of Tableau’s customers selected the product because of its ease of use for the business user. – Gartner

Being a Tableau consulting and development company, we have explored the features of Tableau beyond data visualization. Let’s see how it adds value beyond traditional data visualization.

Case Study

Employees of a national food manufacturing company faced issues while making daily reports. They ended up wasting a lot of time in making those reports using conventional tools

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Mobile support

Tableau dashboards can be deployed at enterprise level and can be viewed and operated on multiple devices – laptop, tablet, and mobile.

Tableau has a higher percentage of users actively deploying mobile BI.

Tableau comes with a robust mobile client. Users don’t need to perform any additional steps to make dashboards mobile- friendly. With touch-optimized controls, visualizations are automatically streamlined for mobile devices. It recognizes if users are using the mobile app and makes adjustments.

• Overview of Tableau and integrations
• Various data visualization trends
• Must have data analytics trends in 2021
• Use cases and live demo
• Present day examples/ case scenarios
• Q & A

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Data analytics

Users can perform basic calculations and run some simple stats in Tableau itself. But if you require performing heavy artillery analytics, you can run your models in R, import results into Tableau and get visualizations of your data with ease.

Tableau makes it faster and easier to identify patterns and build practical models by integrating R. This ultimate combination of R with Tableau amplifies data with visual analytics. Tableau’s visual analytics interface makes analysis of data and interacting with them virtually effortless. For ad hoc analysis, all you need is a right question to ask the data. This makes exploration through complex data virtually effortless.

• Businesses can use Tableau to explore and find quick patterns
• The patterns can be reproduced and further analyzed using R
• Users can create multiple charts to get meaningful insights
• It enhances the use of big data to fetch unseen patterns within the datasets
• Users can also embed the visualizations on their website

Data discovery

With in-built drill-down and data blending features of Tableau, users are enabled with correlations and trends. It enhances the data discovery by allowing the users to dig down to understand the cause of the data-patterns.

Leveraging Tableau Online and Tableau Server, users can view the most up-to-date data. Users can either maintain a live connection to underlying data, or keep data extracts fresh on a schedule.

Data discovery with Tableau gives users multiple views and angles on integrated data sources. It gives users the option to publish data sources separately or leave them embedded in their workbook.

Tableau offers a complete package

Finding key insights in data helps organizations remain competitive within their markets. As data grows in volume and velocity, organizations seek to integrate diverse and complex information. Tableau makes it possible for such organizations to provide hidden insights from their data in an easily interpretable manner.

With extensive experience in data visualization, Softweb Solutions consults enterprises about the usage and procedures to harness the power their data holds. Our in-house data visualization team leverages the statistical capabilities that R and Tableau provide. Using these capabilities, we help organizations get a 360 degree view of their business.

Tableau dashboard development results in customized reports that reflect your identity. Get in touch with our experts to turn your data into insightful information.

If you’re reading this article you are probably wondering if you should be investing your hard-earned dollars or your company’s dollars on Tableau. So, I’ve broken out the advantages and disadvantages of Tableau. Without, a doubt, Tableau is the leader in the data viz space.  However,  there are some limitations that may point you towards another tool.  There are a lot of alternatives out there if you compare to Power BI or Qlikview. Check out our comparison article on 4 Tableau Alternatives.

Reasons to Invest:

Advantages of Tableau

2.  Quickly Create Interactive visualizations:
Using drag-n-drop functionalities of Tableau, the user can create a very interactive visual within minutes. The interface can handle endless variations while also limiting you from creating charts that are against data visualization best practices. You can check out some of the amazing visuals created at the Tableau Gallery.

3. Ease of Implementation:
There are many different types of visualization options available in Tableau which enhance the user experience. Also, Tableau is very easy to learn compared to Python, Business Objects and Domo, anyone without having knowledge of coding can easily learn Tableau.

4. Tableau can handle large amounts of data:
Tableau can handle millions of rows of data with ease. Different types of visualization can be created with a large amount of data without impacting the performance of the dashboards. Also, there is an option in Tableau where the user can make “live” to connections to different data sources like SQL etc.

5. Use of other scripting languages in Tableau:
To avoid the performance issues and to do complex table calculations in Tableau, users can incorporate  Python or R. Using Python script can take the load off the software by performing data cleansing tasks with packages. However, Python is not a native scripting language accepting by Tableau. So you can import some of the visuals or packages. However, you can see how this is down with Python for Power BI.

6. Mobile Support and Responsive Dashboard: 

Tableau Dashboard has a great reporting feature that allows you to customize dashboard specifically for a certain device such as a mobile phone or laptop. Tableau automatically understands which device is the user is viewing the report on and make adjustments to ensure that the right report is served to the right device.

7. Tableau Company Strategy:

Tableau has done a great job climb its way to the top of data visualization tools. So,  according to Garner Magic Quadrant. Tableau has spent more than six years as a  leader. However, with the increasing interest in data science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, Tableau may be left behind if it doesn’t innovate quickly.  You can see from the issues with 2017 financials reporting Forbes concerns with Tableau profitability

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Reasons to Not Invest:

Disadvantages to Tableau

So, now that you know all the great aspects of the tool, lets dive into some of the more challenging aspects of it. The section below is going to highlight some of the pain points that many Tableau users express.

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1. Scheduling or notification of reports:
Tableau does not provide the feature of automatic refreshing of the reports with the help of scheduling. There is no option of scheduling in Tableau. Therefore, there is always some manual effort required when users need to update the data in the back-end.

2. No Custom Visual Imports
Tableau is not a complete open tool. Unlike other tools like Power BI, developers can create custom visuals that can be easily imported Tableau. So, any new visuals need to be recreated instead of imported.

3. Custom formatting in Tableau:
Tableau’s conditional formatting and limited 16 column table displays are pain points for users. Also, to implement the same formatting to multiple fields there is no way a user can do that for all fields directly. Users need to do that manually for each field which is very time-consuming.

4. Static and single value parameters:
Tableau’s parameters are static and always single value can be selected using a parameter. Whenever the data gets changed, these parameters need to be updated manually every time. There is no way a user can automate the updating of parameters.

5. Screen Resolution on Tableau Dashboards:
The layout of the dashboards gets disturbed if the tableau developer’s screen resolution is different from end user’s screen resolution for example if the dashboards have been created in a screen resolution of 1920X1080 and are being viewed in 2560X1440 then the layout of the dashboards will get distorted a little bit. Also, their dashboards are not responsive. So you will need to create a dashboard for mobile and desktop.

6. Limited Data Preprocessing.
Tableau is strictly a visualization tool. Tableau Desktop allows you do to very basic preprocessing. This includes joining and blending data. Also, you have the ability to change data types. In an ideal world, most data would be exported in perfect tables. However, data cleansing is a necessary step. In most cases, an analyst needs to build a data model with recurring to format the data. This requires a tool such as Altyrex, Power BI, Python or even Excel to preprocess data prior to loading. In 2018, introduced their own data preparation tool called Tableau Prep. You can read the results of Tableau Prep vs Altyrex

7. Scaling and Pricing for Enterprise

This is the biggest issue with Tableau, it’s a very expensive product to scale across a  large organization. Compared to cheaper and more well rounded BI tools. Tableau one of the more expensive option. For security and sharing, the only option is Tableau Server which can  $175,000 for an 8 core option and $35 dollars per user. Alternatively, you can use Tableau Online which is limited but is $35 per user. This can accumulate if you are trying to have a large number of users access reports.

 You should also read: Pros and Cons of Power BI