Reasons I started using Tableau over other BI tools
What is Tableau? Most significant BI Tool according to Magic Quadrant
Firstly, you must know what a Business Intelligence tool is in order to understand the importance of Tableau. This can be defined in one sentence and that is: Business Intelligence (BI) tools convert existing data into useful information for decision making. Coming to the Tableau BI tool, the Tableau Business Intelligence tool is most simple, rich and user-friendly.
The features in Tableau are so powerful and easy to use that Gartner Inc, a global research and advisory firm, ranked Tableau as the most significant BI tool in the Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms for six years. You can check out the above image for reference. In this blog post, I am going to share some of the outstanding features of Tableau and a brief content on its competitors.
Connect from Anywhere There is nobody who doesn’t want to connect from anywhere in the world. Sometimes you want to because your clients require it and other times you just like to relax in some secluded place and work on trying out something technical. So, Tableau provides more than 40 data connectors that eliminate the burden of finding or building a data connector to retrieve data from your data source.
Additionally, it supports custom scripts that can pull data into Tableau data extracts. It also provides Web Data Connector (WDC — a collection of APIs) to connect to data on the web.
Flexible Tableau is flexible when it comes to data platforms. In other words, it allows data to reside on-premise, public Cloud, or private Cloud on Linux or on Windows. It also allows users to blend data from different sources while creating the complete view. Since Tableau is flexible, it mitigates the need for using complex joins to obtain the required data from different tables. In-memory data engine (Hyper) makes slicing and dicing of massive volumes data spontaneous and creates extracts. These extracts decrease the load on the databases, increase the performance, and support portability (packaged workbooks could be shared along with the data). Once the data is connected, users can drag and drop the dimensions and measures to create visualization instantaneously.
Tableau Community
You can rely on the Tableau Community for guidance
If you are in need of anything w.r.t Tableau, trust me, the Tableau Community is completely reliable. The Tableau Community is an outstanding feature that boosts Tableau’s popularity among users. With the Community’s help a beginner, even one who has absolutely no knowledge on the working of Tableau, can build a complex chart such as a Sankey Chart in no time.
How Tableau is a superior BI tool Although there are many BI tools available in the market, Tableau ranks number one due to its powerful features. Power BI and QlikView closely follow Tableau.
Tableau in comparison to Power BI One of the main advantages of Power BI is that it is an add-on developed for Excel. People with prior Excel experience would find it easy to adapt to Power BI. However, with Tableau’s data visualization, it provides a lot more advantages than Power BI. Additionally, working dataset size is an important criterion to measure a tool. Power BI automatically creates a dataset when connected to a file, or a live data source. This data set contains credential information and a subset of data from the data source.
Now, Power BI has restricts the size of this dataset to 1 GB. Fortunately, Tableau has no restrictions on the size of datasets. However working with large, complicated data might take a longer time to interpret and render. In such cases, Tableau offers guidelines to increase the performance here. Tableau comparison to QlikView QlikView is another close competitor to Tableau. Although QlikView has handy illustrations and charts, learning the language is a challenge. QlikView is great for preparing text tables with styles and formatting but weak in applying different types of visualization techniques, especially in map views. On the other hand, Tableau creates different types of visualizations and fabulous map views. Furthermore, Tableau has no limit on the data-set size it can handle as it connects to the data, unlike QlikView which uploads the data.
These are just a few reasons why I use Tableau. I recommend you try it and see for yourself. Also, you can certainly look forward to more posts on Tableau from me as Tableau’s features certainly do not stop here. If you do want to try using Tableau and require assistance, you can contact me at Bestir’s Tableau Services.