What is Tableau?

Tableau is an incredibly powerful Business Intelligence tool that can help your business thrive. It offers innovative opportunities to turn your data into tangible, actionable insights. Tableau is trusted across the globe by a whole range of companies both large and small.

Key benefits:

Bid adieu to manual excel reporting - Tableau can give you the data you need at the click of a button
Sits across all of your current data streams regardless of where or what they are
Acts as a central repository for data such as:
- Sales volume
- Average agent call time
- Time spent on specific tasks
Use a range of parameters and filters to create accurate reports over a specific period of time

Practical uses:

Thinking about how to spend your annual marketing budget? Reports can show where to channel resources
Decide which stock to carry based on trends in your data
Absolutely non tech friendly (if set up correctly) - requires no extensive training or technical skills
Ensures all users can take something meaningful from it

This tool can make a huge impact in businesses of all sizes. However, it's not just as simple as downloading the programme. There is a process to go through to ensure you reap the benefits:

Ensure the set up is correct
Capture all relevant data
Access the right parameters and filters from the start

That’s where we can help.

Tableau vs Power BI: A comparison

Feature	Tableau	Power BI
Ease of use	Intuitive drag and drop interface, designed for visual analytics	More familiar for Microsoft users, especially those used to Excel
Data visualisation	Advanced and highly customisable visualisations - excellent for complex data storytelling	Strong visualisation tools but slightly less flexible than Tableau
Integration	Connects with a wide variety of databases, cloud services and APIs	Integrates with Microsoft ecosystem (Excel, Azure, Teams, etc.) extremely well.
Cost	Generally higher licensing fees	More affordable, especially for small to medium businesses
Learning Reqs	Requires more training to reach full potential	Easier for beginners, especially with Microsoft experience
Performance	Handles very large and complex datasets effectively	Strong performance but may struggle with extremely reallyyyyy large datasets
Deployment options	Cloud, on premise and hybrid options	Primarily cloud based, with some on premise capabilities via Power BI Report Server
Best suited for	Organisations needing deep, advanced analytics and custom reporting	Businesses already invested in Microsoft tools and looking for cost effective BI

What projects is Tableau best suited for?

Tableau is of course best suited to projects that are data driven and that require powerful visualisation, reporting and interactive dashboard capabilities. Let's take a look at this in more granular detail:

Business Intelligence & Reporting

Tableau is first and foremost a business intelligence and reporting tool
Projects that revolve around this are a natural fit

Data Exploration & Analysis

Ideal for projects that involve digging into large datasets
Easily uncover patterns, outliers or trends

Financial Modelling & Forecasting

Gone are the days of managing finances in excel
Visualise financial trends, budgets, forecasts and what if scenarios
Supports critical decision making in the business

Ops Monitoring

Great for businesses who need access to real time information
Live dashboards are particularly useful for monitoring:

- Supply chain

- Inventory levels

- Service delivery

- Other ongoing processes

Market & Customer Insights

Perfect for Marketing teams who analyse customer behaviour, segmentation and buying trends
Enables a strategic approach to customer insights

How can we help?

The short answer - however you need us to. We can make sure all your data streams are connected properly whether from spreadsheets, cloud platforms, CRMs or bespoke systems, so you always have one reliable source of truth. We can also design dashboards and reports that are clear, relevant and genuinely useful for decision making based on the information you tell us is important. Everything we set up is done with the intention of being intuitive and easy to use, so your team (regardless of their job title!) can get insights quickly without needing technical expertise. If you're struggling to set up Tableau, unhappy with your current environment or are thinking about introducing Tableau to your organisation - we'd love to have a chat!

FAQs

Q) Is Tableau a reporting platform?

A) Tableau can be used as a reporting platform, it is essentially a database made up of multiple data sources that allows you to easily manipulate and interpret data in a visually comprehensible way.

Q) Does Tableau use SQL?

A) SQL can indeed by connected to Tableau either live - for tuned, platform-specific queries, or by copying data into Tableau's analytical engine to take the burden away from SQL.

Q) What is the difference between Tableau reports and dashboards?

A) According to Tableau themselves - Broadly speaking, reports usually have a more narrow focus. They serve the purpose of providing a deep-dive view into a data set and tend to concentrate on a single item or event.

On the other hand, dashboards tend to have a high-level view of broad amounts of data and are created to answer a single question.

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