Customer Experience Matrix: Tableau Software Makes Good Visualization Easy

5 comments:

Laughing Boy

said...

I am a Tufte-devotee who has worked mostly in printed display media. I'm investigating how to present data via a web dashboard to execs monitoring production facilities. I want an app that will query the db and generate graphs to my specs and push them out to the users desktops.

As a rank novice to the web-distribution aspect, it seems Tableau would be great for an analyst to use, but not exactly what I need as a producer (not consumer) of visual information.

I'd appreciate any guidance you could provide and what solutions are the most cost-effective and flexible.

Thanks.

10:22 AM

David Raab

said...

Most if not all of today's business intelligence software can generate a Web dashboard. Their default designs will not be very Tufte-like, but you should be able to get them to do most of what you want unless you really want something specific like charts within a matrix ("small multiples").

Your post says you ant to "generate graphs to my specs and then push them out to the users desktops". That's a different function than a Web dashboard, which is something they would log into. The "publish and push" approach is probematic for a dashboard because you need to keep republishing the dashboard each time the data changes, and it's harder to do any kind of drill-down. If you have a real need to do it that way (e.g., many disconnected users), you'll have to look a bit harder. (For what it's worth, QlikTech does have a Publisher module to do that sort of thing.)

I don't think Tableau itself has a Web access feature, but could be wrong. If anybody from Tableau reads this, please clarify.

Hope this helps.

12:31 PM

Austin

said...

Tableau does have a new product, Tableau Server, that allows users to view graphs or dashboards via a web browser.

Austin Dahl
(Tableau Employee)

12:32 AM

Mark

said...

The only big thing missing in Tableau is the concept of hierarchies. It sees them from multi-dimensional sources like SQL Server analysis services, but Qliktech finds those relationships automatically.

Proclarity is great at using these hierarchies in its data decomposition tree.

If Tableau added automatic and user created hierarchies, data decomposition tree, and some light, but usable GIS features with basic included maps, I'd be in heaven.

2:47 PM

Austin

said...

One of those features, light GIS with built in maps, was added in the 4.0 release of Tableau.

Austin Dahl

9:48 AM

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