What is Data Visualization?
In data visualization, information is presented in the form of a picture, a map or a graph. This allows the data to be read in a direct manner, enhancing the understanding of complex concepts, and clearly identifying patterns and trends. Data visualization provides a creative and easily understandable translation of number-oriented analytics. As explained by UK marketing authority, Simon Samuel, “Data visualization is going to change the way our analysts work with data. They’re going to be expected to respond to issues more rapidly. And they’ll need to be able to dig for more insights—look at data differently, more imaginatively. Data visualization will promote that creative data exploration.” (Sas.com)
Data visualization is an effective tool for a company to employ. It can help identify areas that might need improvement, delineating factors that influence consumer behavior, which can result in clearer decisions about where to market products and how to predict future sales. Through data visualization, a company can not only quickly process data about marketing trends, but it can also share this information with individuals both inside and outside of the company. Data visualization can improve a company’s ability to communicate with its consumer base, using data that is easily accessible to everyone. Furthermore, it enables companies to process data with greater speed, which can lead to taking quicker action and, ultimately, to enhanced levels of success.
Why Choose Tableau?
Founded in 2002, Seattle-based Tableau is a swiftly growing data visualization tool, highly rated in the Business Intelligence industry. Some of the aspects that make Tableau so popular are its ability to perform real-time analysis, its collaboration of data, and its data blending features. Tableau also offers excellent interface with mobile devices, automatically recognizing if a mobile app is being used, and making the necessary adjustments. It can effectively handle large amounts of data, as well. Widely lauded for its unparalleled visualization capabilities, Tableau offers users a variety of creative options. One important advantage is its quality of being user-friendly, easier to learn than many other systems, and not requiring prior coding knowledge.
Furthermore, Tableau is able to integrate with most data types and is easy to upgrade. In addition to earning high points for its overall performance, Tableau offers a dependable level of customer support, which has kept pace with its growth. According to financial manager, Khai To, “Tableau is the most favorable tool in the BI industry…If your company is looking for a BI product with fancy charts to present to the board of directors, Tableau will always be the first choice.” (Holistics.io)
Limitations of Tableau
Not everyone, however, sings Tableau’s praises with quite the same enthusiasm. One of its major criticisms is that it has poor versioning, not always allowing for new revisions to go back to retrieve old data. There is also no provision for automatic refreshing or scheduling of reports. Other operations need to be implemented manually as well, including custom visual imports and formatting. In terms of its customer support, although many users express satisfaction, it has also been reported that the Tableau sales team is not flexible enough to provide case-by-case attention and maintenance.
Another two areas of concern can be found in issues of security and pricing. Although Tableau is concerned with confidentiality, it is unable to provide adequate centralized data-level security, which increases the possibility of systems being hacked. In terms of pricing, although Tableau is not the most expensive software on the market, its license can be costly for smaller companies. Marketing analyst Yuliya Shaptunova concludes that Tableau “…does its primary job, which is statistics visualization, admirably…However, its weak capability to handle analytical results in the way that many BI tools do prevents it from being the industry standard for many companies.” (SAM-solutions.com)
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Otis Kopp
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