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We’ve done years of research to build a system that supports people’s natural ability to think visually. Shift fluidly between views, following your natural train of thought. You’re not stuck in wizards or bogged down writing scripts. You just create beautiful, rich data visualizations.
It's so easy to use that any Excel user can learn it. Get more results for less effort. And it’s 10 –100x faster than existing solutions.
Because Tableau works with your natural ability to process data visually, you get a huge advantage: speed. Drag and drop to change your analysis. Turn on one-click highlighting to identify trends. Add a filter with another click. You can shift perspectives over and over again until you find that nugget of insight into your data.
Working with massive data? Tableau’s Data Engine is blazing fast. With Tableau you don’t have to use any less than all the data you need. Tableau’s architecture-aware approach means you can bring all your data right onto your laptop and still have interactive response time.
Work with 100's of million of rows of data right on your own computer and get answers in seconds. It’s real-life business analytics for real-life business data.
Publish to Tableau Server and collaborate with colleagues. They too can work at blazing speeds from your shared data sources. It’s real-life business analytics for real-life business data.
Tableau Desktop is an intuitive, drag-and-drop tool that lets you see every change as you make it. You maintain your train of thought without taking your eyes off the data. Anyone comfortable with Excel can get up to speed on Tableau quickly.
People see the advantages of Tableau’s user interface in the first use. But “easy to use” does not mean “limited.” Tableau lets you create rich visualizations and dashboards. Business people use it to understand many facets of their business at once. Scientists use it to create sophisticated trend analyses. And you’ll be surprised at how easy it is.
Combine multiple views into a dashboard. Insert web pages and documents for greater explanation and insight. Highlight and filter related data. Just like your views, dashboards can be connected to live data or can use the Data Engine to speed up your analysis.
When you create brilliant dashboards in Tableau you can share them-- along with your aha! moments-- on Tableau Server. Or keep those beauties all to yourself.
What if you could reach out to any database and just start analyzing it, without the need to prepare anything in advance? Old school business intelligence platforms require users to build elaborate “universes” and “cubes” and “temporary tables” before any real work could be done. Tableau eliminates those steps completely. There’s no requirement to pull data into a silo – work directly from your database. And you can still manage your data connection and metadata.
In Tableau you can connect directly to databases, cubes, data warehouses, files and spreadsheets. Your connection is live so you see up-to-the-minute data. It takes only a few clicks-- no programming is required. In minutes you’ll be accessing data, consolidating numbers, and visualizing results without advance set-up. It's true ad-hoc business analytics.
Connect to data in one click and layer in a second data source with another. Want to add population data from the census to your sales data to see penetration rates? Click. Want to extend your production data with shipping data from those same dates? Click. Combining data sources in the same view is so easy it feels like cheating. You can even filter from one data source to another and highlight across data sources. Just go get that extra data and throw it into the mix.
Watch a video on Tableau's data blending.
Develop in minutes, share to thousands. Using Tableau Server you can publish interactive dashboards to the web in seconds, then embed them in a SharePoint site or view them on an iPad. Because your viewers need only a web browser or an iPad to filter, sort, and answer their own questions, they become more engaged.
It takes only a few clicks to publish, and you don't need to make changes for your dashboards to show up on web browsers, mobile Safari, or the Tableau iPad app. So you can spend your time on analysis and not on IT.
Born at Stanford and raised by a pack of wild PhDs, Tableau has best practices built right in. You get the benefit of years of research on the best way to represent data, from color schemes that convey meaning to an elegant design that keeps users focused on what’s important. You can put your data on a map with automatic geocoding down to the zip code level in the U.S.
We’re out to provide visualization that helps you understand and communicate information in the most effective way possible.


He's the one who always has a handle on the data and can slice it this way and that. He's the one who digs into new trends first. He's the one with the answers. He's the one having fun.
They work at companies like UPS, Pfizer, Zynga, Progressive Insurance, Yahoo!, American Airlines, The Discovery Channel and Microsoft. And at universities like Yale, Cornell, and The University of Oxford. And at public institutions like the U.S. Army, City of D.C. and the Pan-American Health Organization. And more.
Cornell University began using Tableau in late 2007 as a reporting tool that would allow its college deans to better track KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). At that time it purchased one Tableau Server and 20 Desktop licenses.
Today, more than 600 employees use Tableau to do all manner of analysis: from dissecting the student applicant pool to managing contributor relations, from evaluating risk to analyzing university expenditures, and from visualizing faculty salary statistics to keeping track of which students are in what classes.
“We can perform the what-if analyses and look at the different scenarios and come to decisions in real time, as opposed to days or weeks.”
“With some other BI tools that I've used in the past, there tended to be a wall between the engineers who were building reports on those tools and the business users who needed to use those reports to make decisions, that wall prevented us from being able to iterate rapidly to decisions based on looking at data in many different ways.“ - David Botkin, VP of Business Intelligence, Playdom
“We’re able to get answers with information that we couldn’t find before. It became the tool of choice anytime that we were doing any type of analysis.” - Matt Krzysiak, COO, National Motor Club
“Tableau products put incredibly powerful reporting and analytical tools in the hands of operating people—people who know their business and who can, given insightful information, make better decisions.” - Bill Attridge, President, Founder, HTM
“And Tableau allows us, without any form of IT department, to deliver what we regard as kind of enterprise level information and analytics in a very intuitive, very clear, and very cheap way. That’s uh had a transformative effect on the profits of our company.” - Mel Stephenson, Managing Director, Total Disc Repair
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Spun out of Stanford in 2003, Tableau combines advances in computer graphics and database query to change the way you see and understand data.
The five core design principles of Tableau’s visual analysis products are: Easy User Interfaces, Easy Data Exploration, Expressiveness, Visualization Best Practices and Database Independence. All of these principles are embodied in or enabled by Tableau’s VizQL™.
Tableau's first breakthrough was VizQL, a technology that allows you to visualize data of any size simply by dragging and dropping. The innovation is a patented formalism that translates your actions into a database query and then expresses the response graphically.
This created a fundamentally new way of interacting with databases and spreadsheets. People could now combine visualization and analysis in the process of visual analysis.Visual analysis means presenting information in ways that support visual thinking. The right presentation of data makes it easy to organize and understand the information. Computational support for visualization gives the user the ability to iterate on different presentations of data, asking new questions and exploring it interactively.
In building the Data Engine, we have focused on data layout and algorithms that allow us to get speed-of-thought performance without restricting the data to be completely memory resident.
What that means is that you can work with all your data in-memory on a laptop and get query responses in seconds or less. And with huge data comes huge possibility.


Create maps, bar and line charts, heatmaps, dashboards and more. Customize colors, perform calculations and add annotations. And do it all quickly and without weeks of training.
Tableau helps you understand and present your data in the way you always wished you could.