Learn About Tableau Features
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Identify Tableau’s main differentiators.
- Explain how Tableau works with Salesforce.
Learn What Makes Tableau Different
Tableau is the leading modern business intelligence platform because we do things a little differently. Let's explore the Tableau difference.
Intuitive, No-Code Needed, Data Discovery
Most people don’t have the technical skills to connect to and analyze your organization’s data. This means that in most organizations, only a small number of people can be truly data-driven—leaving the rest of the team with limited charts and static reports. We believe data analysis should be about asking questions, not about learning software. People of all skill levels love using Tableau because they can explore and analyze data using just visuals and natural language. With our products in hand, they can answer their own pressing questions themselves, instead of waiting for answers.
- Drag-and-drop visual analysis: At the heart of Tableau is a proprietary technology, VizQL, that makes interactive data visualization an integral part of understanding data. VizQL allows you to simply drag and drop fields to create sophisticated visualizations. It creates a visual representation of your data right away, giving you visual feedback as you analyze. As a result, you get a much deeper understanding of your data and can work much faster than conventional methods—up to 100 times faster.
- Unlimited exploration with no dead ends: Tableau allows everyone in your organization to ask unlimited questions at the speed of thought. As you create or analyze a dashboard, you’re already in discovery mode, helping you unearth and answer even more questions of your data. When using Tableau to build visualizations, you can quickly pivot your analysis—no need to start over or have an end goal in mind. Because of this, you may find answers to questions you didn’t even know you should be asking.
Augmented Analytics Done Differently
At Tableau, we build analytical capabilities that help everyone—from data scientists to business users—get to answers faster. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics, natural language, and smart data preparation help people uncover unanticipated insights in their analyses. From automated modeling to natural language queries, augmented analytics allows more people to answer their questions faster, and with increased confidence in their results.
- Ask Data: Analyze your data using natural language. Type a question and instantly get a response, right in Tableau. Ask Data interprets the intent behind ambiguous and vague questions to give you accurate results. IT and data stewards can easily customize the underlying semantic model for your organization by adding synonyms, definitions, and calculations.
- Explain Data: Get explanations for the why behind a data point with a single click. Explain Data accelerates your analytics by using the power of AI to explain specific points in your data. Based on advanced statistical models, you are presented with a set of explanations so you avoid spending time chasing answers that aren’t there. Go far beyond general trends to get answers to your targeted questions. Explain Data provides focused, interactive explanations as Tableau vizzes (visualizations) for the specific data points you are interested in.
Advanced Sharing and Collaboration
Share data and analytics content with the rest of your team or company to foster a data-driven culture. Publish curated data sources to your Tableau Cloud or Tableau Server environment for teams to explore. These data sources allow team members to ask and answer their own questions of the data as their business needs demand—all with the governance and security you need to protect vital information. Centralize your data management to better monitor performance, user permissions, and data governance.
- Share both data and visualizations: Craft data sources and certify them for use by all analysts in your org, all the while meeting your organization’s requirements for security, compliance, and performance. Publish workbooks and visualizations that you and your team can access through your web browser or the Tableau mobile app. Build a view that exposes a new range of questions in the data, then seamlessly share this analysis with other people using this data in a secure environment.
- Subscribe and collaborate: With a host of features designed to put data at the heart of all decisions, Tableau has built a platform for teams to keep informed and drive the conversations forward. Subscribe to views and set alerts to keep a finger on the pulse of your data. Comment on visualizations with @-mentions to forward the conversation. Share custom views to highlight insights with members of your team.
Connect to Any Type of Data
Tableau supports connecting to a wide variety of data, stored in a variety of places. Everything from data stored on your computer in a spreadsheet, to a data lake in the cloud, to data stored in a cube database on a server in your enterprise, to cloud data found in Salesforce or Amazon Redshift—Tableau can connect to it.
Better Data Prep
Connecting to data is often only useful if that data is ready for analysis. With sophisticated data preparation functionality built into our platform, more people than ever can turn raw data into data ready for primetime. Change the way traditional data prep is performed in your organization. By providing a visual and direct way to combine, shape, and clean data, Tableau makes it faster and easier for analysts and business users to get to their analysis.
Empower All Members of Your Organization
Extend the value of your data with the freedom to explore data in a trusted analytics environment—without limiting them to predefined questions, wizards, or chart types. Regardless of your deployment choice (on-prem, in the cloud, or hosted by Tableau), your analytics are always governed, secure, and up to date.
An Unrivaled Community
Over a million passionate, engaged members help each other every day to find answers and inspiration with their data. The Tableau Community is made up of bold-thinking, problem-crunching, idea-inspiring people like you. They showcase some of the best Tableau has to offer—on Tableau Public, in forums, at regional and online user groups, events, and more. The Tableau Community is where like-minded data rock stars can truly shine.
How Salesforce and Tableau Work Together
Salesforce revolutionized CRM by using the power of the cloud. Tableau puts that rich customer data to work by providing analytics for everyone in your organization. Blend Salesforce data with other types of data, both cloud and on-prem data sources, for a deeper understanding of your business. With Tableau, you can provide your entire sales org, channel teams, marketing teams, and executives with secure, up-to-date, customized views of your data.
Natively Connect to Salesforce
Native connectivity to Salesforce and the Lightning Platform means easily visualizing the metrics that matter most to your business. Simple yet powerful visual analysis means data can drive decisions at every phase of the pipeline: prospecting, lead management, pipeline coverage, account management, and more. Connect sales data to any other data source to gain new insights across your company.
Tableau Accelerators for Salesforce
Tableau Accelerators for Salesforce are designed to help you hit the ground running with actionable data analysis in minutes. In just a few clicks, you can connect and create beautiful, data-rich dashboards on account tracking, quarterly results, top accounts, and more. But these templates are just the beginning. Customize, blend, and combine with other data sources to explore all your data even more fully.
