The Use-Case for Tableau Software
Authored by John F Bremer Jr, Edited by Gina Bremer, Image by Ethan Norgard
Updated 4/14/23
Previously we presented an introduction to data visualization tools and talked about why you might choose one over another. We then looked at a price comparison of the tools as this may be a limiting factor for your organization, a deep dive into a Google Data Studio use-case, and a deep dive into a Microsoft Power BI use-case. For our final post in this tool comparison series, we’ll be exploring Tableau Software and talking through an ideal use-case for it.
POST: A Complete Overview of the Best Data Visualization Tools
Screenshot of Tableau Desktop
THE POWER OF THE TABLEAU COMMUNITY (#DATAFAM)
According to Tableau’s website, Tableau is the most popular and most beloved data visualization platform in the world with more than 1 million active users. Tableau is almost 20 years old and they have built an impressive community and support system for driving data driven business culture. We’ve been active and contributing members of this community for almost 10 years. While it can sometimes feel like a lot of hype, we’ve experienced the benefit of the accessibility, consistency, and depth of this community through:
Connecting with other users in our area at Tableau User Group (TUG) meetups and beyond at the annual Tableau conference.
The Tableau forums; a centralized knowledge base with thousands and thousands of answered questions as well as the ability to ask your own.
Categorized and searchable dashboards available for download on Tableau Public that can be used as a starting point.
To give it some perspective, there are currently over 10,000 COVID-19 dashboards available for download on Tableau Public. Having access to these resources can make a big difference whether you are a beginner or have been using the tool for years. Tableau believes strongly in the Tableau Economy and data culture and they are eager to help anyone and everyone adopt and embrace and evangelize it. For our CEO and Founder, Gina Bremer, their strategy definitely worked.
THE USE-CASE THAT STARTED IT ALL FOR US
It all began in 2013 when Gina started working at PayScale on the analytics team. With data intended to be made public for marketing purposes, PayScale was bringing Tableau Public (the free version of Tableau) into the organization. For any organizations that are analyzing and visualizing public data, you can get the power of Tableau without the licensing cost. The catch with Tableau Public is that you can’t save locally on your computer. Unless you also have a licensed version of Tableau, you can only save to the Tableau Public platform, essentially publishing your data for the whole world to see. If you are working with public data sets in education, government, or using sample data sets to learn, this is a great option. If you’re working on your company finances…not so much.
PayScale had a team of analysts and content marketers working together to tell stories with a massive database of pay data. The analytics team had processes in place to clean and prepare the data. This meant that a curated data set would be produced for each story. This is ideal for bringing data into a data visualization tool as there is little clean-up or data modeling needed in the tool itself, all that work had already been done. The bulk of time in the tool is spent focusing on the presentation and story… cue Tableau.
POST: A Complete Overview of the Best Data Visualization Tools
It’s no secret that Tableau was a great tool for Gina and she quickly fell in love with it. As a person with an analytical brain, but also a love for design and color-coordinating everything, Gina was able to quickly appreciate and leverage Tableau’s high-end visualization capabilities. The design and quality of the data visualization was a determining factor for PayScale as well. These visualizations were being produced for media and were frequently picked up by publications like Business Insider and embedded in articles on their website. With the whole web as an audience, it was critical the visualizations were easy to understand, clear to interact with, and engaging. Tableau has extensive design and interactivity features that can be leveraged to create the desired user experience.
Tableau Public presented a valuable and low-lift distribution channel. It was easy for PayScale to publish a viz telling the story of the return on investment of college education or the jobs with the most job meaning or the inequalities in pay, all at no cost because the data was intended for a public audience.
THE DIFFERENTIATORS
When it comes to leveraging Tableau for internal data, licensing and distribution become a factor, a rather large one. As discussed in our price comparison article, one differentiator of Tableau is a higher price tag. Let’s look at an example for transitioning from Tableau Public to the more costly Tableau Desktop. In this example you are at a 100 person company with 10 people that need to be able to author reporting and another 90 that need to be able to use the interactive reporting with private company data. Your believe your organization can afford it and can leverage and appreciate the higher quality data visualization. For 10 Creator licenses and 90 Viewer licenses, you would be looking at an annual price-tag of $24,600 at today’s prices. That’s significantly more than the $0 for Public and will likely still need justification to get the budget, especially when there are the less expensive Microsoft Power BI and free Data Studio as competitors. Here are some scenarios in which Tableau may have a higher return on investment for you:
You download and reverse engineer visualizations from Tableau Public, rather than start from scratch.
You believe your audience is more likely to understand, trust, and adopt a dashboard with a polished design.
Your user experience design includes advanced interactivity (like clicking to drill through to a different dashboard with filtered data).
You're familiar with fonts and text alignment and affordance and pre-attentive attributes, but not so much with tables and rows and columns and queries and formulas and schemas.
You have control over how your data is organized and packaged up for use in a data visualization tool.
You distribute visuals in a static PDF or PowerPoint eliminating the cost of viewer licensing.
AN APPLES TO APPLES COMPARISON
We recently finished up a 3-month project developing 5 internal dashboards for LiftedViz, our sister-, and our parent-companies. These dashboards are focused on:
Business Finances
Employee Resourcing
Sales Pipeline
Investment Capital Management
Website Analytics
We defined the business requirements, designed and sketched the dashboards, and prepared the data before starting development. We then developed each of the dashboards in all three of our tools: Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, and Google Data Studio. Building out identical versions of the same dashboard with the same data allowed us to see where the pain points are for each of the tools and what points in the development stack required extra work to make things work.
In the end, there were concessions that had to be made in certain tools, and our developers did not agree on their favorite. Our folks that come from a more artistic background loved designing in Tableau. We’ve also got programmer types who preferred the power of the data models in MS Power BI. Most everyone agreed that Google Data Studio was the easiest for prototyping but simply didn’t have the advanced functionality needed to implement the sketched designs without simplification.
IN SUMMARY
For many people, especially those who have more of an artistic bent, Tableau offers the most powerful and comfortable design and development experience. It comes with a price tag that will likely need justification in your organization, unless you are only visualizing public data and can leverage free Tableau Public.
If you’re just starting out, the first step will be determining if all three tools fit with your budget, data sources, and distribution needs. After that, if you’re not sure if you lean more toward visual design or more toward data modeling, why not try out all three tools and see which one feels the most intuitive for you? You can check out our blog series on training courses for Tableau, Power BI, and GDS, and spend at least a couple of hours on each building a data visualization. You may end up liking all three, or one may quickly emerge as your favorite.