- Cost: Tableau Desktop Professional License - $70 per Month
- Difficulty: Easy
- Flexibility: Medium
Tableau can be accessed here: http://www.tableau.com.
It is an interactive data visualization tool that can be used to create business intelligence dashboards. Much like most business intelligence tools, Tableau can be used to pull and manipulate data from a number of sources. Where Tableau differs is in its dedication to helping its users create useful data visualizations. Tableau's drag-and-drop interface makes it easy for users to explore their data via elegant charts. Tableau also includes an in-memory engine in order to speed up calculations on extremely large data sets. Because of this, Tableau has been listed as a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant rankings for business intelligence platforms for the last 5 years straight. Although Tableau offers a no-frills free service called Tableau Public, it is mostly a for-fee software product. Tableau offers a desktop version for individual users as well as two products for distribution of reports (Tableau Online and Tableau Server). In our following example, we will be using Tableau Desktop.