| 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. |
I had the same experience. Before, my company tried several times and failed to implement enterprise dashboards and reporting. I was able to champion Tableau and get it off the ground and even the board of directors peruse the dashboards. I thought I had a huge win. I could not believe the amount of negativity I since received.
That is I believe enterprise reporting is essentially a people problem. The people who looks bad because of the metrics will always blame the tool. They won't be happy until they can manipulate the tool and massage the data until the metric becomes meaningless. In other words, it is convenient to blame the reporting if their report card shows they are failing.