Tableau Software allows users to analyze, visualize, and share information quickly. From building an interactive climate map in science to comparing global growth indicators in an economics class, Tableau Software can be applied in many classes throughout middle and high school. Going beyond Excel, Tableau allows you and your learners to take data out of rows and columns and view it through easy-to-manipulate interactive dashboards.

Website: https://www.tableau.com/

What Users Love About the App

“Tableau absolutely produces the cleanest and most intuitive reports of any software like it. The learning curve for basic functionality is short and the online resources for deeper dives are plentiful.”

“I love how easy it is to visualize data using Tableau. My reports have been transformed from static spreadsheets to interactive dashboards that puts all of the data a user needs at their fingertips. Tableau also does an awesome job of adding new features with every new version of the software.”

“Their training and support teams provide me with all of the knowledge I need to build dynamic interactive dashboards. I find Tableau to be much more flexible in terms of the available types of visualizations and the calculations I can use to manipulate my data and make it user-friendly for those in my organization. I also like how easily Tableau integrates with various data sources including Google BigQuery.”

“Tableau provides wonderful functionality and features when it comes to an easy-to-build and deploy BI solution. It provides a standard list of Visualizations that can be used to build trends, identify outliers, aggregate data, etc. The thing I like the best is the vibrant community of Tableau users.”

“The flexibility of adding data of multiple formats such as XLS, CSV, and so on, combined with the suggestion engine that suggests visualizations based on the data you select is very useful. The flexibility and customization options enable you to make the perfect visualization.”

What Users Dislike About the App

“Tableau as a BI product is costly. The Tableau server is their enterprise edition, so it’s high cost is understandable. But it’s Desktop application for developers is also not free. That makes it difficult to train, and expand the user base of Tableau.”

“Many UI elements when performing analytics or constructing visualizations are not completely intuitive. This may be necessary to provide the more comprehensive functionality of the desktop product.”

“Definitely designed for power users, unless you are only viewing dashboards created by others. Aesthetic options for visualization are somewhat limited, even though the tools themselves are reasonably powerful.”

“Switching between a live connection and extract can be pretty tedious for many data sources. It would be great if there were a way to switch all data sources to an extract automatically instead of having to change them individually (and waiting for Tableau to extract them one by one).”

“Tableau can struggle with scaling to extremely large datasets. Hundreds of thousands of rows generally work well, but once you move to the millions of rows with complex data, you can run into some significant slowdowns. A different BI tool may be more appropriate for these scenarios.”