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Is Tableau Dead?

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Re: Is Tableau Dead?

#11

Post by CobrastanJorji »

MissTake wrote: post #2

Our renewal got Shanghaied by an extremely greedy and over zealous sales rep who injected himself between us and our renewals reps, and wanted to turn a sub $80k renewal into damn near $200k this year and $300k next. Needless to say it got nowhere fast and, by the time he gave up and threw us “back” to renewals, the damage had been done. We elected to do what they thought was unthinkable and we just walked away. My o…

One can safely assume Salesforce has very well made internal Tableau visualizations of Salepserson performance. That sort of failure would almost certainly show up with crisp drop shadows.

It is a shame, however, that the behavior of the sales rep probably made the renewals rep's chart look bad if not worse.

Re: Is Tableau Dead?

#13

Post by wenc »

I've been using Tableau since 2013 to deploy dashboards, which in my case are front ends to ML model output. (for me, I used it as a Streamlit before Streamlit existed)

People think of Tableau as a dashboard tool, which it is. But it's also a great tool for doing EDA (exploratory data analysis) on multidimensional data. Instead of writing lots of seaborn/ggplot code (and having to remember the syntax), you can just move things around in Tableau in a fraction of the time.

The downside of Tableau is that you have to have a strong relational database way of thinking to use it effectively. You have to think in terms of aggregations, and occasionally in terms of window functions (Table calculations in Tableau). Tableau was (is?) a much more powerful tool than Power BI (at least this was true in 2019 when I last used PowerBI).

Tableau has never been a simple tool by any means. I was a scientist but I used to run Tableau training in my workplace, and I could see how long it took for things to click for most folks. Once you got beyond a few bar charts, things got really complex (partly because you were unlocking a lot of power through relational operations -- in data analysis, there's rarely power without complexity)

Relational thinking is a very powerful way to think about (and execute) computation on large-scale data in a performant way -- it is after all the algebra of dataframes -- but I've come to appreciate that it is beyond most people. Even software engineers struggle to think relationally -- many still think in for-loops.

Also, things that were seemingly easy to do in Excel -- like doing a row and column cell calculation -- were very difficult. You had to think about the corresponding SQL manipulation and then reproduce it in Tableau....

... but I think most people just want to plot nice graphs from their Excel data and show it to their bosses. (which they can do with Tableau, but so can they with Power BI)

Side note: I have a copy of Tableau 2023 but it seems to have reached a feature plateau -- it is barely different from the Tableau of 2020.

Re: Is Tableau Dead?

#15

Post by treflop »

kimi wrote: post #7

I don't know jack about Tableau, but if the alternative is Power BI, I got a feeling they may be safe. My current company sells telephony and call-center analytics for MS Teams using our software, and during pre-sales meeting, one of the staple questions is "So we can avoid Power BI entirely?" followed by a minor thanksgiving ceremony and presentation of credit card. I get a feeling it's not too dear to the hearts of…

Power BI is great, and so is Tableau. (Or at least when I used them a few years ago.)

Most people just don’t to analyze data and hardly even know how to use Excel, so something like Power BI or Tableau looks like rocket science when really these tools should make you feel like you’re upgrading to power tools from basic hand tools.

Re: Is Tableau Dead?

#16

Post by antoine_b0ss »

kimi wrote: post #7

I don't know jack about Tableau, but if the alternative is Power BI, I got a feeling they may be safe. My current company sells telephony and call-center analytics for MS Teams using our software, and during pre-sales meeting, one of the staple questions is "So we can avoid Power BI entirely?" followed by a minor thanksgiving ceremony and presentation of credit card. I get a feeling it's not too dear to the hearts of…

I work for $LARGE_ENTERPRISE_CONSULTING_FIRM and I'd really could do without Power bi. It's so sluggish and a time-waste. If your product is even half-good, I can see why they like it. What does it do exactly?

Re: Is Tableau Dead?

#17

Post by Dyac »

pinewurst wrote: post #4

I’m not sure this is totally on Salesforce as the Tableau product has gotten so sluggish and inflexible. At my last job I started dumping data from Tableau to CSV (don’t get me started on the crap CSVs that Tableau generates) and importing to R for analysis. Good riddance.

We have Tableau but I've never found it particularly useful, as most of what I do is very exploratory and Tableau seems more like a place to build final presentation of things that will just go to gather dust.

I now use both of these tools below (no affiliation), which you might find interesting.

[1] www.exploratory.io

[2] www.count.co

Re: Is Tableau Dead?

#18

Post by antoine_b0ss »

ako wrote: post #10
kimi wrote: post #7

I don't know jack about Tableau, but if the alternative is Power BI, I got a feeling they may be safe. My current company sells telephony and call-center analytics for MS Teams using our software, and during pre-sales meeting, one of the staple questions is "So we can avoid Power BI entirely?" followed by a minor thanksgiving ceremony and presentation of credit card. I get a feeling it's not too dear to the hearts of…

Why do they want to avoid PowerBI?

[dead]

Re: Is Tableau Dead?

#19

Post by kimi »

ako wrote: post #10
kimi wrote: post #7

I don't know jack about Tableau, but if the alternative is Power BI, I got a feeling they may be safe. My current company sells telephony and call-center analytics for MS Teams using our software, and during pre-sales meeting, one of the staple questions is "So we can avoid Power BI entirely?" followed by a minor thanksgiving ceremony and presentation of credit card. I get a feeling it's not too dear to the hearts of…

Why do they want to avoid PowerBI?

I'm not sure, I just see it happen.

To put things in context, our small claim to fame is anyway getting some aggregate data about lost calls and attempts that is not possible to produce in Power BI directly[1]. So it's likely that they would buy or not buy it even if it was based on Power BI itself.

[1] https://www.queuemetrics.com/teams.jsp

Re: Is Tableau Dead?

#20

Post by oxfordmale »

I hate Tableau with a passion. The main bugbear is that viewers can't see the SQL code the dashboards execute. I am no fan of Looker, but the "Explore here" allows other users to see the SQL and tweak it if needed. Most intermediate data stakeholders are confident enough to modify the where clause to suit their custom needs, allowing them to self-serve.

The licensing costs are prohibitive, too. It is almost unaffordable to share Tableau dashboards with your customers and, instead, have to send them static PDFs of your dashboard.

Beyond that, the Tableau infrastructure feels like something from the last century. Data is cached on the server using data extracts rather than following a more modern caching infrastructure.

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