CU Employee

Reporting Tools

I am looking for data visualization/reporting feedback. We currently use SSRS and Spotfire. We are exploring PowerBI and Tableau. Does anyone use PowerBI or Tableau and have positives/negatives or any suggestions?

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Replies

  • Vendor

    Hi Travis, 

    We use Tableau as part of our client-facing deployment at Twenty Twenty Analytics, and our cilents love it. It's user friendly and flexible. If your only experience is with Excel pivot tables, you can dive right in and start creating. If you're a Tableau Expert, the possibilities are pretty much only limited by your imagination. 

    Despite its huge success in the market, Tableau wasn't necessarily invented with the intent of creating a scalable infrastructure. Their story can be found here: https://careers.tableau.com/ourstory

    Before I knew the story, I would sometimes make the point "Tableau seems like it was created by some really smart college kids while drinking in their dorm room." What I mean by that, is sometimes things that seem like they should be easy are complicated (e.g. Logical Grand Totals), but the challenge there is offset, to us at least, by its flexibility. 

    I've only spent a few minutes in Power BI. I quickly preferred the visual, "analytical" (decisioning) functionality of Tableau, although suspect Power BI might be more useful for what I'll call reporting (presenting numbers). I'm local to Tampa, and would be happy to show you what we're doing in Tableau. 

    Are You Tableau?
    We're looking for great people to join us. If you love data and want to build the next great software company, Tableau is for you.
  • CU Employee

    We are just getting starting using Power BI. We really like the experience thus far.

  • CU Employee CULytics Founder

    Hi Travis, Why are you looking to move away from SSRS/Spotfire? How much adoption do you have for these tools in your organization? I brought Tableau to First Tech and saw very good adoption. 70+% of First Tech employees were using Tableau dashboards on day-2-day basis. We did compare Tableau with Spotfire, Microstrategy, QlickView before we made a decision. Off course the landscape is very dynamic and has changed signficantly since we made the decision.

     I should be able to help answer any specific question that you might have about Tableau deployment.

    • CU Employee

      Hi Naveen, SSRS isn't interactive enough for us. It is also a little clunky and time consuming to build basic visualizations. Spotfire, while highly capable, is not user friendly enough on the back-end (Server Settings, Active Directory Integration, and Data Source Maintenance/Automation). In an effort to go more Dashboard focused with some power users, we are looking at Tableau and PowerBI.

      I am not looking for an answer to a particular question, but more interested in how people like what they use or why they decided to go with one over the other.

      Some things I noticed already:

      -Tableau has better geographic tools

      -Tableau is more user friendly (back-end and front-end)

      -PowerBI is more mobile friendly

      -PowerBI has more statistics integrated (we use R)

      • CU Employee CULytics Founder

        Hi Travis,

        Totally understand where you are coming from. If you have any specific question about Tableau then I can help.

        Thanks,

        -Naveen

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