Tableau Software: The Ultimate Business Intelligence Solution

This is the credo of Tableau Software. The business intelligence platform facilitates all stages of data management to transform information into valuable assets for the company. So what is Tableau? What are its features? What are its advantages and disadvantages? Let's take a look with École Cube.

What is Tableau Software?

Created in 2003 by Chris Stolte, Pat Hanrahan, and Christian Chabot, Tableau is an ultra-comprehensive data visualization solution. The software offers all the essential features to transform raw (sometimes unreadable) data into relevant assets for decision-making.

Tableau is a leading BI tool, acquired by Salesforce

These features are so comprehensive that Tableau has become a reference in the data visualization and business intelligence market. So much so that it was acquired by Salesforce in 2019. Fully integrated into the CRM, Tableau becomes an indispensable decision-making tool for companies.

What are the main features of Tableau?

As a 360º data visualization tool, Tableau offers its users a wide range of features. Here are the main ones:

Dashboard Creation

This is the foundation of data visualization tools. The idea is to transform data into visual representations that are understandable by everyone. To do this, Tableau integrates different formats of graphical representations, such as diagrams, time series, line charts, tables, scatter plots, interactive maps, treemaps, and more. At a glance, decision-makers can identify performance indicators and project progress. Additionally, Tableau Software integrates various alerts, allowing users to receive notifications when certain thresholds are reached.

Good to know: the creation of graphs is based on tooltips. As soon as you hover over one of these representations, a tooltip appears. This allows you to customize your dashboard according to your needs.

Advantage: since the data is readable and understandable, analysis is simplified. This allows for better decision-making.

Connections

To create dashboards, data must first be collected. Often, this data comes from a variety of sources. It can be the Salesforce CRM, but also social networks, machine sensors, connected objects, website logs, and more. In short, data sources are scattered across many tools and third-party applications. Fortunately, Tableau Software integrates them. You can connect your data from:

- Salesforce,

- BigQuery,

- Snowflake,

- Hadoop,

- Redshift,

- SQL,

- CSV,

- Excel,

- Google Sheets, ...

Thanks to these integrations, graphical representations are automatically updated. As soon as there is a change in one of these applications, the Tableau dashboard updates.

Advantage: you do not need to navigate between all your solutions to access the data you need. And most importantly, you have real-time access to all your data, regardless of its origin.

Data Preparation

Before analyzing data in the form of graphs, diagrams, and maps, the data must be prepared. Since they come from various and diverse sources, the data is often available in very heterogeneous formats. Not to mention that some are erroneous, obsolete, or unreliable. Once again, Tableau Software has thought of everything. Through its Tableau Prep feature, raw data is cleaned, processed, and transformed before being integrated into the dashboard.

Advantage: you work only with ready-to-use data, without spending too much time on preparation.

What can be created with Tableau Software?

Thanks to all these data visualization options, Tableau Software facilitates reporting for all sectors of activity. Here are some examples:

Insurance: to analyze claims data. This allows for the detection of trends and anomalies.

Healthcare: a hospital can track emergency room wait times to improve efficiency and patient satisfaction.

Industry: by analyzing machine data, it is possible to predict breakdowns and plan proactive maintenance.

Retail: to compare store performance and identify the best sellers or those needing improvement.

What are the limitations of Tableau Software?

Even though Tableau is very practical, it has some drawbacks that should be known:

A high price for small businesses;

A lack of automatic scheduling options;

Difficulty importing visual data;

A display limited to 16 columns.

Our opinion on the Tableau solution

Tableau Software is for everyone. Do you have no technical skills? You can still create dashboards thanks to an intuitive and easy-to-use interface. And if, on the contrary, you want to create very advanced reports, Tableau makes it easy with complex formulas and a programming language.

In addition to a very broad target audience, we like the range of features offered by the platform. Between data centralization, dashboard customization, and advanced analytics, Tableau clearly contributes to the development of a data-driven culture.