Consuming large sets of data is not always easy. At times, these data sets are so huge that it is almost impossible to pick out anything useful from them. Moreover, creating the visualization of these data sets is even tougher. However, it is not completely impossible but who would want to spend hours plotting dots on a scatter chart and pull out useful information? This is where Tableau comes in.
Tableau – Table of Contents
What is Tableau?
Tableau is the most powerful and fastest-growing visual analytics platform that is used in the business industry. It transforms the way people use data to solve millions of problems. Tableau helps by simplifying the raw data into an understandable format that empowers people and organizations to make the most out of their existing data set. Moreover, it makes data analysis very fast. The data visualizations created from it are in the form of worksheets and dashboards. Moreover, the data created using Tableau is easily understandable by any professional at any level of business. Even a non-technical user can create his/her customized dashboard easily and quickly.
Why Tableau?
Tableau makes its customers leaders in their businesses and industries. It changes the way people use their data. The impressive thing about Tableau is that it can be used by anyone and it doesn’t need any technical skill or programming knowledge to operate. Moreover, it turns insights into actions, cuts down the time taken for analysis, and changes the behavior helping everyone to be more data-driven in their business. Besides, it caught the interest of people from all sectors whether it be researchers, businesses, or any other industry. In conclusion, there is no doubt why it is the best and the best data visualization tool in the world.
Why you should use Tableau?
Nowadays, data is growing faster than ever. People are now generating even more information due to which analyzing this huge amount of data is tedious and complex work. Therefore, companies use Tableau as it not only helps in data visualization but it also drives millions of dollars in savings. Here are 5 reasons why one should always choose Tableau over any other similar software.
- Quick and interactive visualizations: It allows easily analyzing the data, sharing insights, and creating beautiful visualizations.
- Easy to use: You can perform complex tasks with its drag and drop functionality, get answers to your questions in no time, and create rich visualizations in just a few seconds.
- Handles abundant amount of data: This software can handle millions of data sets that are even 10 years old or more. Moreover, this doesn’t even impact the performance of dashboards.
- Mobile friendly dashboard: Users can operate Tableau on any device whether it is a laptop, desktop, tablet, or mobile. They don’t need to perform additional steps to make it mobile-friendly.
- Integrates with scripting languages: The users can solve from the simplest problems to the most complex ones easily. The BI tool in it integrates with R or Python that helps amplify data with visual analytics.
Tableau Features
One interesting feature of Tableau is its drag and drop functionality which makes it the best BI tool. One can easily master this software by just understanding its UI based features and functionalities. This section highlights some of the top features of Tableau.
- Tableau Dashboard: It provides a good view of all of the data in the form of texts, visualizations, visual objects, etc.
- Collaboration and Sharing: Tableau allows securely sharing data like sheets, dashboards, etc, and collaborating with users.
- Live and In-memory data: The software ensures connectivity to data extraction and sources from exterior data sources as in-memory data.
- Data Sources: It offers countless options of data sources to connect and fetch data from.
- Advanced Visualizations (Chart Type): You can create numerous visualizations such as histograms, box plots, bar charts, pie charts, etc.
- Maps: Users can create informative maps including cities, postal codes, etc.
- Robust Security: Tableau has a security system that is based on authentication and permission for user access as well as data connections.
- Mobile View: With the help of Tableau, users can create dashboards and reports that are compatible with mobile.
- Ask Data: This feature allows the users to type a query and it will present them with the most suitable answers.
- Trend Lines and Predictive Analysis: It is possible to create trend lines and get data predictions with Tableau.
Tableau Architecture
Tableau Server Architecture is designed in such a way that it connects many data tiers. It is highly available, robust, and secure. Besides, it runs on both virtual and physical machines. Such powerful features need a robust architecture. Let’s study it in detail.
- Data Servers: It is the primary component of the architecture. It helps Tableau to connect to data sources including database, web application, etc. Also, it is responsible for the relationship between different data sources.
- Data Connectors: Data connectors are the components that provide an interface to connect data servers to data sources. It includes a live connection or real-time data and extracted or in-memory data.
- Components: The three components are the Application server, VizQL server, and data server. The application server provides authentication and authorization. VizQL server converts the queries into visualizations from data sources and the data server stores and manages the data from external sources.
- Gateway: Gateway sends requests from users to the Tableau components and also acts as a load balancer.
- Clients: Dashboards and visualizations can be edited and viewed using clients like mobile applications, desktop, and browser.
Tableau Benefits
In today’s market, Tableau is the most popular do it yourself business intelligence tool for reporting and data visualization in the organization. If you are not familiar with the benefits that Tableau comes with, then in this section you’ll get to know about some of the most appealing benefits of it.
- Tableau has inbuilt data connections and tools that help the analysts to quickly acquire data in a useable format reducing time to pull and prepare data and making accurate decisions.
- The drag and drop feature allows the users to try new ideas quickly, make updates, and drill into engaging areas.
- Stakeholders can interact with the dashboard and customize it according to them and within the parameters of the creator.
- The Tableau server provides up-to-date dashboards making it a central repository. So, dashboards can be shared and stakeholders can favorite some views, comments, etc.
- Finally, it has a large online community; it commits improvement and listens to the needs of its customers. Besides, it has been a leader in the market for seven years in a row.
Tableau New Offerings
It is Tableau’s mission to help its customers see and understand data in the best way possible. The new update of Tableau has brought the right capabilities for the right people at the right price. It added creator, explorer, and viewer subscriptions that provide simplicity and sophisticated analysis. Therefore, it allows customers to choose their required analytical capabilities to meet the needs of the organization. Tableau has also released new web authoring capabilities, renowned Tableau desktop and data preparation application Tableau prep so that users can choose if they want to work on-premise or in the cloud.
The latest features of Tableau include:
- Sandboxed extensions
- Tooltip editing in the browser
- Improved tables
- Improved maps
- activity feed and Ask data
- SAP HANA connectors
- Webhooks support
- LinkedIn sales navigator connector
- View recommendations
Advantages and Disadvantages of Tableau
Despite having designing capabilities, visualizing abilities, and numerous features and benefits, there are some limitations and advantages that one should take into serious consideration before making any decision.
Advantages –
- To begin with, it provides exceptional visualizing capabilities that its competitors are unable to match.
- Tableau is super easy to use. Therefore, users can perform any function in it without any in-depth training for it.
- Offering a robust and reliable performance is its specialty. It operates on big data and makes performance powerful.
- It lets the users establish connections with multiple data sources improving data analytics quality.
- The best customer support is offered to help users with their issues and improve their experience.
- At last, efficient mobile apps are developed for IOS and Android users. Also, it supports full functionality in it just like a desktop.
Disadvantages –
- It has a high cost. The license can be a bit more costly for small to medium businesses.
- Inflexible pricing is another disadvantage. Customers are charged for all the features in the licensed version even if they are not using some of them.
- This software fails to provide centralized data-level security. So, there are chances that the system can be hacked.
- Revision history is supported by only recent versions while it is not the case with the older versions.
- Lastly, it doesn’t allow smooth embedment. Thus, it’s a real challenge to integrate it with the company’s product from both technical and financial points of view.