Tableau Public
After downloading but just not getting around to using the software on three separate occasions, I finally created my first chart (or should I say “visualization”) using the free Tableau Public platform. The visualization I created was for Give Me The Rock and it graphed the top 200 fantasy basketball players on a scatter plot based on how similar or dissimilar they played during the 2010-11 season.
While I am by no means an expert on using the software, here are my first impressions on Tableau Public.
The Good Stuff
I mean, let’s start with the fact that Tableau Public is free to use. In a world where I pay to drink water, that is a very good thing. Loading up the software, I noticed that the interface is very slick and creating a basic chart is fairly easy to do. I’m a guy who likes to jump in head first without reading a manual, and I appreciate I could do that and still create something cool. For the most part, the software is drag and drop with your data displayed on the left hand side of the screen and the visualization on the right. You simply start dragging your data into the appropriate place and the magic happens.
Also, the visualizations look great – on par or better than what Excel can produce. The shapes, colors, labels are all sharp and really pop on the screen. But the best thing about the software is that Tableau Public knows exactly what it is and what people use it for. The chart options that it provides seem spot on and the ease and speed at which the software allows you to slice and dice your data and the way you present it is something that Excel can’t come close to touching. For example, my visualization of 200 NBA players was original crammed on the screen, but Tableau Public has a pages option that allows you to split out your presentation into different pages which can be viewed individually. I ended up splitting my graph into pages by player position to make it more readable.
If your the type of person that likes to experiment with different ways to present data, then Tableau Public has the potential to save you a lot of time.
Finally, Tableau Public makes it incredibly easy to share visualizations on the web. It provides scripts that you can copy and paste right into your blog, as well as an option to email it to others. You can also download any visualization on the web onto your computer if you have Tableau Public. No more worrying about versions of Excel and compatibility issues.
The Bad Stuff
Like all cloud software that I’ve used, Tableau Public is a touch slow for my tastes, especially in regard to loading and saving data. For a one off chart (excuse me, visualization) I can deal with it, but given the spastic way I typically work, I wouldn’t want to work with it all day long. Tableau has professional versions of the software (for $999 and $1,999 depending on the version) that I’d assume solves this problem by not requiring you to work in a cloud.
And while the software is generally easy to use, I’d say it’s still a step or two away from being perfectly intuitive. There were a few things that took me a while to figure out. I didn’t realize you could drag the interactive legends/tools around the screen and they would be presented in that exact location when you published the visualization (very handy). And while I split my graph by player position to make it easier to read, I still wanted to add a total page that presented all the data on the screen at once. I never did figure out how to do that.
Finally – and this may bother some people more than others – while Tableau Public is free, you are required to save your visualization to their servers. Once published, your data is in the public domain for all to see. Obviously if you have proprietary data, Tableau Public is not for you (although again, the paid versions will solve this problem).
The Verdict
Overall, I’m impressed with Tableau Public. As a guy who uses Excel on a daily basis, it’s not going to replace that for my day-to-day work, but it has definite advantages over Excel like its ability to slice and dice data in any number of ways and the fact that Tableau makes it very easy to share visualizations with others. The next time I create a graph that is going to be displayed on a website, I’d hands down use Tableau Public do to that. And did I mention it’s free?
