What is Tableau? A Complete Guide to Data Visualization and Business Intelligence
Introduction
Tableau is a platform for corporate intelligence, data analytics, and data infrastructure designed to make data-driven decision-making easier. It was created with the specific goal of "helping people see and understand data." Both small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) like Marination, an Asian-Hawaiian food truck restaurant in Seattle, and multinational corporations like Unilever utilize Tableau.
What Is Tableau?
Data analysts, scientists, statisticians, and others can use Tableau, a highly powerful data visualization application, to visualize data and derive insights from data analysis. Tableau is well-known for quickly processing data and generating data visualization output. Essentially, it transforms your data into insights that guide your actions. All of this is possible while maintaining high security standards.
Important Tableau Features
Data Connectivity: Tableau connects to a variety of data sources such as Google Analytics, Salesforce, AWS, Excel sheets, and SQL databases.
Interactive Dashboards: Create dynamic, interactive dashboards that allow users to explore data from various angles.
Real-time Data Analysis: Tableau allows real-time data analysis, enabling businesses to make prompt decisions based on current data.
Tableau's Products
Tableau Desktop: The core product that allows for unlimited data exploration and creation of interactive visualizations.
Tableau Public: A free version for creating publicly available visualizations that can be shared via blogs and social media.
Tableau Online: A cloud-hosted service for creating and sharing visualizations without worrying about server configurations.
Tableau Server: A server-based solution for hosting visualizations on your organization’s server infrastructure.
How BI Encourages Development
Business Intelligence (BI) software, like Tableau, gives executives access to all of their company’s data to identify inefficiencies and successes. This empowers organizations to improve processes and make data-driven decisions with ease.
The Advantages of Tableau
Data-driven Decision Making: Tableau helps eliminate uncertainty by presenting real-time data visualizations.
Improved Collaboration: Dashboards can be shared with teams for collaborative decision-making.
Time Efficiency: Automated reporting processes save valuable time for businesses.
Scalability: Suitable for small startups to large corporations.
The Purchase of Tableau By Salesforce
In August 2019, Salesforce acquired Tableau to enhance its reporting capabilities and integrate business intelligence into its customer-facing products.
Tableau vs Other BI Tools
Tableau competes with BI tools like Google Data Studio, Power BI, and QlikView. Tableau stands out for its user-friendly interface, ability to manage large datasets, and strong visualization features.