In this month’s Tallan Tech Talk, Farheen Meer, Tallan Lead Consultant, walked us through the Tableau Data Visualization tool. As part of her presentation to the Tallan team, Farheen went over cost models for the tool and basic visualization development, as well as some interesting features such as data blending and forecasting. She also shared various ways to share Tableau Reports and facilitated a discussion on Power BI vs. Tableau reporting. Here’s a brief overview of what we learned.
In the Business Intelligence Industry, Tableau is a rapidly developing data visualization application. It aids in the simplification of raw data into a format that is simple to comprehend—making it an option that users can utilize at all levels of a company. With Tableau, data analysis is quick, and visuals can be created in the form of dashboards and workbooks. Tableau software’s best features include data mixing, real-time analysis, and data collaboration.
Tableau offers both horizontal and vertically pivoted dashboards, lending itself to its trademark unique visualizations. Overall, Tableau is known for having stunning visuals that can achieve powerful storytelling results with data.
A Time Tested Solution
Most people are familiar with Gartner’s Magic Coordinate for Analytics. Gartner includes essential criteria for leaders, challengers, visionaries, niche players, analytics, and power app platforms. You’ll notice on the graphic below the three leaders are Microsoft, Qlik, and Tableau.
There is differing criteria used to compare vendors here. Microsoft and Qlik have been leaders on this quadrant for many years, with Tableau represented for almost a decade. Even as technologies change, Tableau has been able to remain a leader.
Product Options
Tableau Desktop is a downloadable application used to develop reports on your machine. There’s also a new edition of Tableau Prep, which is used to clean up data prior to being loaded into the Tableau Desktop. For the most part, there’s not a lot of data cleaning and aggregating that needs to be done at that first level, keeping the process nice and simple. Tableau is perfect for users who just want to understand how their data relates or how different aspects of your business work in synergy.
Tableau is known for having stunning visuals that can achieve powerful storytelling results with data.
So let’s say you’ve installed Tableau Desktop, you’ve created an amazing report, and now you want to share it. There are a few different avenues that you can take to share. Most of the time, organizations will host their own Tableau server. Users often publish to the server for their respective organizations until the reports are received. Keep in mind, there is an online managed option called Tableau Online, where your server is actually handled by Tableau, albeit with a higher cost. This option is ideal if you have nonsensitive data and simply wish to show a specific share group.
If you go down the route of publishing out to the Tableau server (a more inexpensive option than Tableau Public), you can acquire Creator licenses for $70.00 a month. If your team has users that just need to review and assess data, the Explorer license is recommended. Generally, if users will be looking at the data and not interacting it, licenses are traditionally lower in cost. If you’re considering deploying with Tableau Online, the Creator license is still $70.00. Notably, with the Creator license, you get Tableau Desktop, Tableau Prep Builder, and one license for either Tableau Online or Tableau Server.
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