Tableau was founded in 2003 and since has become one of the most popular data visualization tools today. The company was founded by Christian Chabot, Pat Hanrahan and Chris Stolte. Currently the company is headquartered in Seattle and was acquired by Salesforce in 2019.
Why do we use Tableau?
Tableau makes data visualization easy and simple for the average consumer. After doing some research and exploring some tableau functions, I immediately fell in love with the simplicity of the product. As an aspiring data scientist, making clear visualizations is everything. Tableau facilitates this task by taking the technical aspects out of the equation.
Normally, I would write a few lines of code to make visualization such as bar graphs and scatter plots and these graph would usually be created through Seaborn or Matplotlib however using tableau and a few clicks of your mouse, a user can create an effective visualization in minutes.
Another great aspect of tableau is that it allows you to clean and combine data easily. The built in tableau prep builder takes out all the code that you would have to write for exploratory data analysis and makes it very easy to join and merge different types of data. Powered by the cloud, tableau can also process very large data sets in minutes.
Above is an image of the prep builder , as you can see there is a clear map of the data and it breaks down exactly where each piece of information is gathered and leads to. Normally you would have to create a schema on your own and keep track of the links between the data sets but Tableau takes care of all that for you!
Another cool feature that I stumbled upon is the Ask Data feature. Ask Data allows people to use natural language to interact with data through a fast, powerful interface — it’s as simple as typing a question with guided search suggestions to get instant answers. Results come in the form of rich data visualizations that enable business users to get the insights they want from their data.
As an example above, pretend that you are a sales manager for Google and you wanted insight on profitability in the western states, especially Arizona. Using tableau, you would simply write “profitability in Arizona” and tableau will do the rest! An example output would look like something below:
As for any successful product, it is only natural to have some competitors. Top alternatives to Tableau include, Sisense, Oracle, QlikQ, IBM and Mircrosoft. Most people that turn to alternatives refer to Tableau’s high and inflexible pricing as the main reason, while many others cite Tableau’s speed and its steep learning curve for more advanced functions. Tableau currently has more than 84,000 accounts while the next closest competitor has only 25,000+ (IBM).
Tableau Creator costs $70 per user/month (billed annually), regardless of deployment method while Tableau Explorer costs $35 per user/month (billed annually) if deployed on-premise and $42 per user/month (billed annually) If deployed in the cloud. Tableau Viewer costs $12 per user/month (billed annually) if deployed on-premise and $15 per user/month (billed annually) if deployed in the cloud. As you can see these prices may not be the most affordable for the common user.
Currently, Tableau is maintained by salesforce and the software comes on-premise or from the cloud. Businesses can choose the best option for their business needs.
Below I have attached a simple video tutorial on Tableau so that you can see how easy and simple the tool is to use and how it could or may help you on your future projects!
If you want to practice Tableau and not pay the high costs associated with the program, Tableau Public is a product that is free! After exploring and learning about tableau I definitely think that this is a tool that I am interested in learning after my data science bootcamp. I believe strong visualizations help tell the business story and Tableau may just be the tool that I’ve been searching for.