Helpful software
What do you like best about the product?
Helpful in discovering relationships between variables
What do you dislike about the product?
unable to map street addresses, only uses zip codes, cities, countries
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
trying to find relationships between variables.
Dashboards created by my data team used to show sales results & marketing investment
What do you like best about the product?
Easy to interact with the tool with drop downs to show different data
What do you dislike about the product?
I'm not the one that uploads the data into the tool. From my perspective, it does what I need it to do
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Show results with dashboards and easy-to-interpret graphs
Visualization on Tableau Desktop
What do you like best about the product?
Better visualization than most data analysis software
High level of customization to varying levels of granularity on the same sheet or without recreating different visualization for higher or lower levels of granularity. For example, by using filters such as age bins we can visualize how a dependent variable changes with the regressors in different age-groups on the same sheet. We do not need to create different figures for different age groups as in other software.
Managing databases such merging databases, e.g., inner join, outer join, are much easier in Tableau.
What do you dislike about the product?
I have not yet been able to figure out how to add error bars if I have already a column for that data. This is easily accomplished in other software such as SigmaPlot.
Being a comprehensive application, it requires some initial training. It is not something I can start using it right away.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I have just been using it for a month or so. We are using it for our academic classroom project and my research project. We are visualizing healthcare data related to prevalence of most common causes of morbidity and mortality in the US over the last few decades and how effective the US healthcare system has been in improving these rates.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Understanding this application will require some patience and time. But I guess this effort will be well rewarded with continued use. I have the opportunity to use it free for one year on academic license. I am however taking a tutorial on Udemy.com for learning this application. Time spent learning this is worth it.
Great product for data visualization
What do you like best about the product?
The ability to perform data visualization at all levels-beginner or quick analysis to advanced analysis where you control and program your own variables and code.
What do you dislike about the product?
The learning curve can be steep if you don't have access to a lot of resources to get started. Training is pretty much necessary to get value out of this product.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We use this product to analyze our business performance and visualize how our contract vehicles are being utilized by vendors and customers. We can answer complex questions from business lines and leadership and help ensure that we are conducting business efficiently and meeting performance metrics over time. This ultimately ensures we are good stewards of tax payer money.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Be sure to take any available training so you can get the most use out of this product. There are a plethora of resources online through Tableau and from users submitting content via discussion boards and youtube. It is imperative you have clean, high quality data or you will not get much out of this product.
Visual analytics on your laptop
What do you like best about the product?
The ease of load a data source! By far, in my career, locating data has always been trickier than visualizing it - with Tableau 10 and VizSQL, you can rapidly explore, visualize, annotate and tell a story to your senior management so that they can act upon it. No other solution has ever been as effective and swift to do so>
What do you dislike about the product?
The fact that Tableau will charge you 20% of your original license to upgrade and carry on support. I can understand upgrade but not support. Support should be endless, this is called Customer Experience. Feels like Customer Ignorance on that scheme.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Digital marketing analytics across several platforms, you can connect to them and aggregate Key Performance Indicators on the fly. Tableau does it, they rule!
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Start with Desktop and review Server or Online after 1 year on Desktop+Reader.
Strong for basic dashboarding
What do you like best about the product?
Simplicity, ease of use.
Very good for 90% of visual data needs.
What do you dislike about the product?
Can be made much more visually appealing, a bit of an ugly duckling.
Can be a bit slow with large data samples.
Seems a bit too cookie cutter and from a design-standpoint doesn't adapt to the page or filtering seamlessly.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Turning excel data into something digestable.
No longer have to switch between multiple pivot tables and documents to understand campaign performance.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Great for most tasks. If you have huge data sets, complex customized needs or need your dashboards to be beautiful, maybe not the perfect choice.
Great software that is easy to use and easy to connect to data
What do you like best about the product?
The easy, drag and drop methods to creating sophisticated reports from your data. This software is easy to link to your database live so that you can access updated information every day as opposed to refreshing data. The data visualization is clear and aesthetically pleasing. There are many different charts that are easy to set up and are useful to use in dashboards. The story features is of great use for presentations and for organizing your data in a meaningful way. The trending and forecasting modeling is easy to use and to evaluate. It is easy to extract data from the model information.
What do you dislike about the product?
Working with time series data can take a lot of data cleansing before hand. Also, it can be difficult to make data relationship links that work in the direction of your intended use.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Quickly and accurately providing interactive reports. We have realized the benefit of being able to create dashboards quickly for our team to view.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Connect to your data live. This helps keep up to date analysis without having to refresh data manually.
Best visualization on the market
What do you like best about the product?
Powerful data visualization tool, many options for data connections and great ecosystem of partners.
What do you dislike about the product?
Desktop is a great tool, but when looking at Server and other products, economics become challenging or unsustainable.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Combine data from many sources, visualize data to make it easy to understand.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Understand the different options - cloud, server, desktop in thinking about long-term strategy.
I was shocked by the power of this tool.
What do you like best about the product?
The application takes very complex sets of data from a variety of different sources, and consolidates them into one easily analyzable view. The program also surprises you with extra capabilities, like the ability to map data to geographic points for a map view.
What do you dislike about the product?
There is sometimes a disconnect when connecting datasets from Excel or other legacy applications to Tableau.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We are working on global business planning and strategy for sales, and Tableau allows us to easily visualize our analyses for effective presentations.
Tableau provides very fast interactive visual analysis.
I do use both Tableau and QlikView. Although very different, I really like both solutions. They belong to the new BI generation known as Interactive Visual Analytics.
In my opinion, QlikView has a more intuitive interface for regular users or executives that are not technical experts but the development side is a little more complex. Up to version 12 QlikView did not provide drag & drop features.
If a user wanted to see something not included in the application the new object had to be created by a power user or developer because Qlikview's scripting has somewhat of a learning curve.
On the positive side, QlikView's scripting is a great asset as it functions as an ETL allowing the integration of hundreds of different data sources into the same visual app.
Another feature that’s extremely useful is Qlik’s proprietary Associative Model that allows the users to visualize data relationships that exist as well as those that do not.
Tableau on the other hand is a lot easier to use for developers, analysts or power users who need to connect, manipulate and visualize data rather quickly. While this makes Tableau a better fit for the more analytical crowd, it may not be as appealing or intuitive to the regular or casual business users as QlikView is.
Tableau has full pivot, drag & drop and drill down capabilities that are great for developers or power users. They can rotate measures and dimensions and graph them instantly using visualization best practices as suggested by the "show-me" feature.
Tableau’s provides a forecasting function and the capability to connect with the open source statistical program R to include predictive modeling.
Tableau includes a Data Interpreter that makes data cleansing, column splitting and crosstab pivoting very intuitive. Tableau’s latest versions allow joining tables from different data bases and have included the hyper data engine that provides 5 times faster query speeds.
The latest version includes "relationships" with an algorithm that makes
the necessary data connections automatically with no need to perform joins or add Level of Detail scripts (LOD) to eliminate duplicates. However one can still create joins to override relationships if for some reason it was necessary.
Also when opening older files containing joins they are kept under a
"migrated data base" or the migrated joins can be deleted to be replaced with simpler automatic relationships. Tableau releases updated versions once a quarter.
Both Tableau and Qlik continue to be excellent. They are positioned at the top of the leader's quadrant in Gartner's 2022 Magic Quadrant report for BI and Analytics platforms.
In my experience the choice depends on the fit with the company culture and the users' profile.
Qlik introduction of their new platform called “Qlik Sense” provides intuitive drag & drop functionality to create visualizations. At this point Qlik Sense Desktop is free for personal and small group of cloud business users that need to easily develop analytic applications on their own - with virtually no IT intervention.
Recently Tableau has moved to a subscription based model but still offers free products: Tableau Public and Tableau Reader to ease the user entry process.
It certainly seems like Qlik Sense is an attempt to regain some of the impressive growth Tableau has enjoyed during the last few years playing in the truly self-service visual BI segment.
