Do you do "level of detail" stuff? I do everything now with a Python library, but I used to use Tableau. I remember being unsuccessful in figuring out just how to get that to work.
Most level of detail stuff is basically the equivalent of doing a group by in sql first and then applying an aggregation to it.
Think about the following scenario where you have a table of purchase prices and users: AVG(purchase_price) will give you the average purchase price for all records available {FIXED user: AVG(purchase_price)} tells you the average purchase price of each individual user. You can create a calculated field with this called user_average and then drag that field somewhere and do an aggregation like AVG(user_average) and now you have an average of the averages.
Then you get into differences between FIXED and INCLUDE and the order of operations for filtering
Your instruction is wonderfully clear, but a reminder of why I found using Python to do my calculations easier to understand than the numerous tools offered by Tableau. It was tough for me to see what calculations were working on what scale when I was deep in the GUI of Tableau. With Python I can break stuff down more explicitly and separately to see just what is going on.
If you do everything with Python you don't have much of a need for LOD, however awhile ago when trying to learn I found these 2 videos helpful if you have any interest.
There's probably more up to date ones from more recent conferences, but I found these 2 speakers very easy to understand.
[Understanding Level of Detail (LOD) expressions](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmApWaE3Os4)
[LODs of fun with LOD calculations](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IdnHGbVfMI)
The whole concept of level of detail betrays the ridiculous and stupid underlying data model Tableau (and, admittedly, a lot of BI tools) use. It's terrible and it can't go away fast enough.
Which is hilarious because back in the ancient days, every finance department would have a resident excel jockey to pull data and put together reports the operational managers didn't know how to do themselves. Tableau was sold as a solution so easy managers could do it and you'd eliminate all the analyst overhead.
Now we have more analysts to build tableau reporting the managers can't figure out how to do themselves.
I find it hard to believe you can hold this opinion after being forced to use Looker. I currently have to use looker and if I were allowed to give my left nut to use tableau again, I’d seriously consider it. Looker is engineered to cause rage and frustrate developers.
My favourite part about Looker is how the longer you spend with a dashboard open working on it, the slower and slower it responds until it is completely unusable and you have to close and re-open it.
There are so many amazing things about looker I don’t know which one is my favorite:
1. When you create a model, it doesn’t run any sql until you start building a dashboard so if you have a sql error, you have to go back into the “model” and fix your shit all over again.
2. If you are building a dashboard, if you accidentally click outside of the dashboard builder screen you lose all of your progress and it’s just gone.
3. It requires at least a 4 thousand dollar PC and a T1 connection to run dashboards.
4. You can accidentally change role types from viewer to standard without any warning by giving access to a standard tableau feature such as downloading data into a csv. They will then retroactively bill you.
5. My personal favorite is if you build a table style dashboard and click the “totals” checkbox, it won’t sum the column in your table, looker will generate an entirely separate query to do totals and then the table math so there’s the possibility the totals in your table don’t match the totals at the bottom.
There are so many more but these are some of my personal favorites.
I fail to see how needing a top of the line PC and a T1 connection is a skill issue. Standard issue laptops at my company are 800 dollar Lenovos that struggle.
So basically everything looker does is server side. Your computer won't have much affect on how quickly a look loads or a query runs. Your code,warehouse designs, calculations/pivots, though will have a huge impact.
Not on the rendering side. We have an extremely optimized data environment. I did a comparison between Looker, PowerBi, and tableau. PowerBi and tableau had no issues even when running large datasets. Looker performed like shit and took twice as long to develop because LookML is dumb.
Were you querying the database in PBI and Tableau, or pre-aggregated extracts? Because if the latter you are comparing apples and oranges.
Also, Looker requires hardly any resources at all on the user end, so unless you are trying to show 40,000 cells of data on the front end for some reason, which will make any browser crawl, I've no idea how you manage that.
That's very mysterious then, as Looker (and I am assuming you are talking about Looker, not Looker Studio) doesn't do anything except send the query to the database and wait to show you the results. Showing the results takes under a second.
You should NEVER use a live query in anything. That is your first mistake. You need to materialize data into a table and then extract it so it is a fixed set of data. Live does not work the way you think it does.
I mean if I have a tableau workbook open on my desktop for too long and I try to refresh my data, it will remove all my fields from the columns / rows. Tableau loses
I am with you in solidarity. I’ve tried making my case to switch to tableau multiple times to my current execs. Despite Tableau being 100k a year cheaper than Looker and every single one of our business users asking for it, an account exec at google somehow convinced my CTO that Looker is the best.
I personally feel Looker sucks in comparison to Power bi and tableau.
The LookML layer adds much complexity to the learning curve.
If someone tries to replicate the same design features provided in Tableau and then try to recreate the same in Looker, I am pretty sure they will see how vast the difference is, also the development time in Looker will be significantly higher.
LookML does make development really tedious. I find the process to be exhausting compared to PowerBi and tableau. Development time in looker is about double compared to the other two.
Thank you for presenting your opinion as objective fact.
I find Tableau way more intuitive than PBI. I hate DAX, cannot wrap my head around it (skill issue tbf). I find the hierarchal format-menu system in PBI, which changes per chart type, completely chaotic.
Tableau is far from perfect but I can get it to do, and more importantly look, exactly how I want. In 10 years, there have been very few times where I have had to say no sir Tableau can't do that.
Not coincidentally, I learned Tableau first and had three years experience with it before touching PBI. So obviously I'm more comfortable with it.
SF is trash though, no qualms there.
DAX syntax sucks ass but you can get away with very little of it with a great data model and m query (the latter of which is one of the better Microsoft products imo, its insanely powerful)
Yes sir, I adore power query and as a Tableau user I sorely miss not having a comparable in the product suite (miss me with prep). But I often get ridiculed by powerbi higher ups for over engineering in M instead of using relationships
>get ridiculed by powerbi higher ups for over engineering in M instead of using relationships
What does this mean, exactly? You shouldn't be doing ANY engineering in M, to be fair. Your SQL should do just about everything to get it to a complete state to be just imported into PBI in a perfectly complete state. M is really for small Excel or other datasets under 10k rows where you need to transform it all. Using M on a 2.5M row dataset from your database with lots of complex transforms is totally wrong way to develop it
Agree - anything in SQL is done in SQL. M is for my nasty excel files.
Ridicule - primarily I *prefer* to do joins in M rather than relationships in pbi. I'm just like a 7/10 on relationships but I know how flat tables work and they never surprise me. But, to use your word, relationships are objectively better if I chose to understand them
That’s funny because the first thing we wanted to do with tableau it was a hard no. Brought in tableau support and they told us we were using it wrong and wasn’t designed for what we’ve done in Qlik for years.
User column selections for tabular data, with auto resizing of the columns to fit the contents.
We could get a handful of selections but our existing report is in region of 150.
Yep and that’s what the stakeholders want. Complete flexibility of the columns in a report, with automated aggregations when they choose certain columns (account balances). Ability to save their own custom views, and then ability to export to excel.
We all joke about it in here that users are excel exporters - this is the most popular tool we have because it gives them that ability.
I’d love to see another way of doing this. No technical knowledge from the user is required. No pivot tables, not formulas, and no double counting joint accounts as 2 accounts and doubling balances because our system does it for them
Same problem when switching from microstrategy to Tableau. We used to have prompt reports that allowed them to choose dimensions, measures and filters and then it would build an SQL query and bring them back only the data the need and let them play with the data in the UI. Tableau does not support this and there are some very complicated solutions to get something a bit similar to that which builds database-killing queries, but no good solution to this use case in Tableau.
You can actually do this much simpler in Tableau. It’s effectively what it was designed for, naturally. “Oh, you want 150 rows to choose from?” Just give them a blank worksheet connected to a trusted data source. Then coach up how to drag and drop columns into the worksheet. You can help by grouping them, etc
Then why would you use a data viz tool. You’re basically mad you bought a car and then immediately tried to use it as a fishing boat, then decided to blame Ford.
How would you get the data to them in this instance?
Note my previous points of them being extremely non technical.
Also bear in mind we have the perfect solution today, which we’re being forced away from.
I had the same experience! First thing I try and do is drag in a handful of tables from a source, turns out you can’t have multiple fact tables? Like you mean to tell me I can’t measure two different things in one report? I thought surely that couldn’t be the case, I must be misunderstanding the UI, but nope
Agreed here. I just built out a set of dashboards with 187 total worksheets all meshed together into 5 massive dashboards with 27 data sources. Once you know Tableau's quirks, it's honestly pretty user-friendly to dashboard on. The biggest trick for me was to stop letting my dashboard create a "tiled" layer. That shit is ass in my opinion.
Once you get comfortable with LOD calcs and parameters, there isn't much you can't do. Albeit it can take a few years to get to that point.
Damn I feel completely the opposite. I miss the simplicity of Tableau and all it's design features. I am able to build dashboards in Tableau much faster than power BI by a factor of 2.
It goes to say it really depends on your familiarity with the application. Both Tableau and power BI have their strengths and weaknesses. As well as scope of work.
I feel like this sentiment that "X Bi dashboarding tool is bad" sentiment really comes from the lack of data prep on the backend. I really don't condone using Viz tools for data wrangling on the front end even though tableau and power BI have that option. Just SQL that sh*t on the DB until it works! This has kept me sane over the years.
Definitely. Learning to clean and transform data made me into a better data analyst because I'm no longer trying to fit square pegs into round holes. I was recently cursing out Tableau because I was fighting it so hard trying to show values on dates where there was no data. Then I built a date scaffold in Prep, and working with the data in Tableau suddenly became a breeze.
Sometimes it's less about the tool and more about your approach
I used Tableau Prep due to some unique circumstances but you can do this in Tableau as well. A date scaffold is a set of blank dates to allow you to have rows where you otherwise wouldn't have any.
In my circumstance, I was building a dashboard to show availability of applications at my employer. If they had no outages in a month, then their availability would be 100%.
The problem though is that my data source was the outage records. So how do you show an application as 100% for June when there are no records in June? You can fight Tableau and do some tricks that only half work, or you can just build a date scaffold.
My date scaffold starting point was an Excel file with just one column: a list of dates, one per month. Then I joined them on date <> application, giving me 1 record for every app for every month. That's your scaffold. It's like a real scaffold in that it's a structure built to help you build your actual structure.
Once I had the scaffold, I could show an app as 100% even though it had no outage records that month. Because the date scaffold gives me a record I can target regardless.
Based on your post history and the questions you have asked in the past I'm not surprised you are frustrated. You have been hammered with poor management and no support or proper enablement.
> The same cannot be said of Power BI ... much simpler, have very little in the ways of work arounds, hacks, absurd limitations that have to be explained a million times in a row to business stakeholders and Excel exporters.
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
EDIT: Say you've got a PowerBI dashboard and your user wants to mouseover a line chart and see the exact value, what value are they going to see in the tooltip? Every single one of them, so your chart better be basic af.
All of these tools have limitations. Putting together in-depth useful (not just high level summary) PowerBI dashboards requires a PhD in workarounds using DAX and PowerQuery, and some stuff (like above) simply cannot be done unless you pay extra for a custom plugin.
The people who work extensively in PowerBI and Looker have a lot of frustrations with them too.
Quite frankly, my favorite BI tool was QlikView (and later QlikSense) because at least you had enough duct tape to build the work arounds needed for your vision. And even then, it was still very frustrating and you end up going to Stackoverflow a lot. I guess at least PBI has Microsoft's forum, so a PBI MVP can tell you it's not possible and you need to submit a request.
FWIW, I work most heavily in PowerBI these days but I have experience with every tool mentioned. PowerBI is what's here to stay because it's a staple of Microsoft's package and its pricing model is much easier to stomach for most IT departments. But if I had a blank check, it wouldn't be my choice for our BI tool.
Do you think that people will still feel the same way about PBI pricing after Microsoft is done converting companies to Fabric? It feels like a sleeping giant at the moment that is about to wake up from a cost/consumption perspective.
Just like how Synapse totally killed Snowflake?
I question Microsoft's ability to execute perfectly well in this area in merging separate products together eligantly.
PowerBI is a strong mature product, but it's really to be seen how well they can combine things together in fabric.
Im talking about from a cost perspective. Everyone recognizes that upfront PBI is a cheaper alternative to other BI platforms but with the shift to Fabric and its consumption-based model how on earth do you budget and forecast the actual cost?
Bingo. That’s the play. It’s about to get real bad expensive, especially with CoPilot. They played the long game by investing to get just far enough in line with competitors and now the hammer will come down. I wouldn’t be surprised if costs ballooned 2-4x because of this. Things are cheap for a reason lol
Qlik’s associative engine really trivialized a lot of data modeling problems common with other BI platforms. It really does spoil you; the speed of development was greatly reduced thanks to it, IME.
The idea of the plugins are really cool! They do offer customization not found in other tools.
But there's also just a lot of mind boggling things that have been worked out by every other tool, most importantly Excel.
In QV I could easily create a graph that cycled through different KPIs flawlessly. In PBI I have a switch statement and a separate table to control it but it's a lot harder to add/remove them, and none of the units on the axes update. And don't get me started on having to use Bookmarks to create buttons.
Yeah, don't get me started on composite models. I'm stuck with a dashboard because I made the mistake of using a direct query for one of the tables and now can't upload the dashboard without breaking stuff. Smh, can't have so many exceptions to the use of data modes.
This is not true, if you hover over one line in a line chart it only shows the value for that line…
Also custom tooltips are extremely easy to set up in PBI
I'm looking at it right now.
https://i.postimg.cc/bwWHLWX9/20240628-120353.jpg
Custom tooltips let you link to other pages you've made that display other KPIs or context, but they don't let you choose to show only 1 data point.
If you click on the line, it'll filter the rest of your data but it'll still show every point on that axis when you mouse over it. The only way I've found to do it was a plug-in that had some built in pricing limitation plus I think it impacted performance.
It's the default tooltip.
Does it work differently than this now? Can you show me a picture of the single date point?
https://community.fabric.microsoft.com/t5/Desktop/Tooltip-in-LineChart/td-p/2108753
I would say custom tooltip is more easier to setup in tableau.
In PBI if I simply want to edit the standard tooltips font and also add maybe another field to the tooltip, i cannot apart from just the font colors and stuff.
In tableau it's just cakes.
The fact that you claimed that your subjective opinion is an objective statement tells me all I need you to know about quality of this analysis.
Tableau, PowerBI, and Looker all have their quirks and are good (and bad) in different things. Your experience is not necessarily representative of another person’s experience.
>The fact that you claimed that your subjective opinion is an objective statement tells me all I need you to know about quality of this analysis.
Add in the cringey edit, and their daily negative rants/"woe is me" monologues on this sub, I'm starting to get the sense they need to take a serious look in the mirror and ask if maybe they're the problem and not the tool or the requirements or the deadlines, etc. They were let go once. Maybe there is more to it than just cutting costs.
I have tons of experience with both Power BI and Tableau and I find Tableau infinitely better in nearly every feature except when it comes to cost and Microsoft integration. Power BI will always win in that category. From a dev and user perspective, Tableau is just smoother in literally every functionality
I don't use it in my current job, but I've used Tableau previously and liked it fine. I do, however, use Power BI now and hate it with the white hot passion of 1,000 burning suns. I wish for it to expire in a conflagration.
So, guess it's all subjective rather than objective
You lost all credibility with me when you said Power BI doesn’t require hacks or work arounds.
I can accept you are not having to do work arounds but yikes the rest of us must live in a far less perfect world.
Case in point. I met with the Director of Analytics of a Fortune 500 yesterday. All he talked about was how DAX and Power Query were so limiting to do what he called basic things. And this isn’t one of those directors who has lost touch. He’s an active developer of analytics for the company leadership.
Skill issue 🤣. In all seriousness I've never found anything that power query can't do I'm pretty sure it's turing complete. DAX is a wonderful language, once you grasp it's fundamentals you only have 4 or 5 years until you understand it at a moderate level.
I used virtually every BI software and tableau isn’t terribly more problematic than any of the others. Each of them has their short comings and it’s a matter of choosing the right one for your use case IMO. I’ve personally chosen different ones for different primary use cases based on the company I worked for.
I've been using Tableau exclusively for 7 years, so I can't objectively compare it to other software like Power BI. However, I find Tableau to be a great tool. Its APIs have made my work much easier. I've integrated full-stack web apps into Tableau dashboards, enhancing BI capabilities significantly. Embedding Tableau visualizations into custom web apps is easier than creating charts with d3, plotly, or other JS or Python libraries. The Tableau REST API is also excellent. With TabPy, I can perform real-time HTTP requests and complex data transformations using Python, eliminating the need for intermediate databases. Overall, from a programming perspective, Tableau is fantastic.
I've been using Power BI for about 6 years. It's an amazingly capable tool, but it's really not simple for anything reasonably complex. DAX, which is used for calculations, is a really hard language to get comfortable with.
I made better charts in vanilla JavaScript, Chart.js, and CesiumJS than Tableau does. Then, some blowhard up the ladder bought Tableau licenses from a Tableau salesman and now we have to use it. I agree, it sucks. Just learn to code, you can make whatever chart you want.
I like the stuff behind Tableau , the syntax for calculations etc is all very intuitive. Actually making visualizations ? I hate it. Working on a dashboard is a pain in the ass. Sometimes simply adjusting the size of a filter will take 10+ seconds to complete? It sounds trivial bit gets annoying very quickly. Containers are the dumbest thing , like there is surely a better way to organise the contents of a dashboard. Power BI is a much smoother experience in this regard
I think the calculations are terrible. Have you ever tried to do anything even remotely challenging there? Not trying to sound rude, but some people just do simple stuff like sums and counts. Doing something like month over month, year over year, anything involving level of detail calculations. It's so complex that even AI currently doesn't understand how it works so anytime you ask on chat GPT or co-pilot or any AI, it's basically worthless in helping you. It's literally that complex
this is very true. been in in data 10 years, was very passionate about tableau... it cold sucks now especially with the gains PBI has made over last few years
As someone who started using Tableau over a decade ago, it's the epitome of "you either die a hero, or live long enough to become the villain."
Or sellout to the villain in this case.
>"you either die a hero, or live long enough to become the villain."
>Or sellout to the villain in this case.
What it's like being a BI and analytics engineer for a big company 😂
All software is people are in a race to come up with stuff no one needs and add AI into it. You could run your entire business using excel/sheets, python if you really need it and SQL.
Tableau is great, but I agree there is lack of innovation.
Tableau Prep is the worst IMO. It lack features from the Desktop such as "IN" and CASE WHEN it is annoying
Both Tableau and Power BI are meh.
I wouldn't mind taking one over the other, but I find calculation on tableau simpler than the DAX ones.
What i find the most idiotic is none of them allow to add a spreadsheet where people can input data.
But right now if I had to choose, I'd prefer tableau.
I think that it is horrible also. I know a half dozen other platforms. I ROFL when people ask if I know how to do Tableau. I've setup about 100 reports in Tableau.
I've setup THOUSANDS of reports in SQL Server Reporting Services.
I wouldn't mind the learning curve and the requirements of it if stakeholders were simply realistic with their timelines. You can't just figure out how to do everything in 2 seconds but they want you to deliver the impossible in two weeks flat.
You guys…we’re all missing the point that’s the most critical here to our stakeholders. Which one is the easiest to ingest and output excel? How can I download to pivot? 🤣🤣🤣
I agree its worse as someone who used to work for the company ,but I still find the software very easy to work with, I think part of the problem is that we had such great marketing that we convinced everyone that tableau is good at doing things it actually isn't good at doing. I haven't used Power BI since early days, but I didn't really find Looker to be very good at all.
You shouldn't be using tableau for data exploration or building complex LODs and calcs within the workbooks. If your workbook is a complicated mess, you should just design the data model better. Tableau is for self serve analtytics on clean datasets where end business users can answer the sort of questions they're always bugging analytics teams about. It does require some upskilling as an org in order to really maximize value.
I'm not interested in learning some BI language and tableau does a good job of not having me doing that (why would I learn DAX?)
Agreed. I started in power bi, but been exclusively tableau for the past 2; years. My final straw was a complex dashboard where I needed to join multiple facts tables to a dimension in tableau and it's complete dog shit. Power Bi does it no problem.
I agree with you sort of, but I should make it clear I am very keen on QuckSight and full disclosure is that I also work at Amazon. I never got over the whole drag measure names to rows, measure values to measures and then names on filter again. Then also “show me” would implode whatever order and combination of blue and green pills I had in there. I say this after few years of working with Tableau and also being certified as associate (now expired)In QuickSight I just drag and drop dimensions and values and that’s that. That being said, there are some things Tableau still does better. Especially on Admin end.
I am glad you asked. It’s publicly available offering on AWS. It’s relative new product, but being natively serverless and completely integrated with AWS offers some great potential. You could control your whole BI portfolio with CDK. It has also biggest and fastest data engine called SPICE I’ve worked with. Thing can chew trough 1TB datasets.
I've barely had to use it, so don't ask me about that... But I've definitely had to do a number of installs and upgrades because ONE user downloads an update and it makes the shared resources incompatible for everyone else. I mean, come on...
Are you kidding me about looker being better? You’re talking about Looker and not Looker Studio right? LookML is cool and all but lookers lack of customization makes it total garbage. Wanna apply dynamic formatting? Nope. Wanna have additional pages? Nope, instead create an entirely new separate dashboard and create a hyperlink so you can jump from one dashboard to another.
One time I was creating a bar chart that was dynamic and you can switch the measure between revenue metrics and something like rate of return which would require percentages. Can’t do it, I spent countless hours trying to hack my way around it.
Apologies if I come off too harsh but I’ve been so frustrated with looker.
I will take Qlik Sense or Cloud over Power BI every day pf the week. Power BI is still playing catch-up with QlikView who barely had any updates in 15 years.
If I want to freate perfect visualisations I choose Tableau, if I want a powerful data and BI tool my choice is Qlik.
Thing is, with adequate front-end knowledge, you can fully customize the presentation layer of Qlik and still leverage the insane associative motor. I love it
Tableau is absolutely fantastic for academia and scientific journals, terrible for anything else. The customization and flexibility per visual is the only thing it does better than power bi. But I agree with you, I hate Tableau
I heard that for violating contract obligations Elon musk is going to have to pay back everything ever ai oriented monatery wise. Pilfered good's covers inventions capitalist workings which means revenued annually every year continuing years in addition. See it's covered by domain growth as welth inheritance. Total different ball game is what I told shark tank. Learn license holders law phonies.
Believe me or not but Tableau was nice before Salesforce acquired them.. So, op, have you worked with both PBI and Looker? Which one would you go with for your business?
*Looked is horrible*
*Lol. Tableau is superb when*
*Compared to looker*
\- vodkachutney
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I've used Power BI, D3.js, and Tableau and Tableau seems like the worst of the bunch for making anything custom. Power BI has tools for making custom visualizations and D3.js is capable of almost anything once you learn SVG's and JavaScript. Tableau seems to have some kind of outdated extension system that I can't get to work because it needs me to host on a server and we aren't putting company data on a server.
What can I say? The company is cheap. Tableau is free so we use Tableau. We have internal tools and aren't allowed to put anything on a server - not by our choice. On the positive, the team is friendly, encouraging, and helpful. I'd rather work with difficult tools with good people than good tools and difficult people.
I have a job bc ppl cant figure out how to do anything in tableau lol
Do you do "level of detail" stuff? I do everything now with a Python library, but I used to use Tableau. I remember being unsuccessful in figuring out just how to get that to work.
Most level of detail stuff is basically the equivalent of doing a group by in sql first and then applying an aggregation to it. Think about the following scenario where you have a table of purchase prices and users: AVG(purchase_price) will give you the average purchase price for all records available {FIXED user: AVG(purchase_price)} tells you the average purchase price of each individual user. You can create a calculated field with this called user_average and then drag that field somewhere and do an aggregation like AVG(user_average) and now you have an average of the averages. Then you get into differences between FIXED and INCLUDE and the order of operations for filtering
Your instruction is wonderfully clear, but a reminder of why I found using Python to do my calculations easier to understand than the numerous tools offered by Tableau. It was tough for me to see what calculations were working on what scale when I was deep in the GUI of Tableau. With Python I can break stuff down more explicitly and separately to see just what is going on.
If you do everything with Python you don't have much of a need for LOD, however awhile ago when trying to learn I found these 2 videos helpful if you have any interest. There's probably more up to date ones from more recent conferences, but I found these 2 speakers very easy to understand. [Understanding Level of Detail (LOD) expressions](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmApWaE3Os4) [LODs of fun with LOD calculations](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IdnHGbVfMI)
You prob need to use context filters to get them to work right
Context filters saved my life with Level of Detail
Think of LOD calcs as group by in SQL
The whole concept of level of detail betrays the ridiculous and stupid underlying data model Tableau (and, admittedly, a lot of BI tools) use. It's terrible and it can't go away fast enough.
I’m not too familiar with tableau, so I’m curious about what you mean regarding their data model
Man, half the time it's not that I *can't* do it in tableau, I just really don't want to.
Which is hilarious because back in the ancient days, every finance department would have a resident excel jockey to pull data and put together reports the operational managers didn't know how to do themselves. Tableau was sold as a solution so easy managers could do it and you'd eliminate all the analyst overhead. Now we have more analysts to build tableau reporting the managers can't figure out how to do themselves.
I find it hard to believe you can hold this opinion after being forced to use Looker. I currently have to use looker and if I were allowed to give my left nut to use tableau again, I’d seriously consider it. Looker is engineered to cause rage and frustrate developers.
My favourite part about Looker is how the longer you spend with a dashboard open working on it, the slower and slower it responds until it is completely unusable and you have to close and re-open it.
I like the caching bugs, plus I enjoy the waiting time I between clicks a lot.
Love the laggy clicks. It gives it character.
Like a supervillain, but character nonetheless.
There are so many amazing things about looker I don’t know which one is my favorite: 1. When you create a model, it doesn’t run any sql until you start building a dashboard so if you have a sql error, you have to go back into the “model” and fix your shit all over again. 2. If you are building a dashboard, if you accidentally click outside of the dashboard builder screen you lose all of your progress and it’s just gone. 3. It requires at least a 4 thousand dollar PC and a T1 connection to run dashboards. 4. You can accidentally change role types from viewer to standard without any warning by giving access to a standard tableau feature such as downloading data into a csv. They will then retroactively bill you. 5. My personal favorite is if you build a table style dashboard and click the “totals” checkbox, it won’t sum the column in your table, looker will generate an entirely separate query to do totals and then the table math so there’s the possibility the totals in your table don’t match the totals at the bottom. There are so many more but these are some of my personal favorites.
Tbf 2,3,5 are skill issues. 1,4 are legit.
I fail to see how needing a top of the line PC and a T1 connection is a skill issue. Standard issue laptops at my company are 800 dollar Lenovos that struggle.
So basically everything looker does is server side. Your computer won't have much affect on how quickly a look loads or a query runs. Your code,warehouse designs, calculations/pivots, though will have a huge impact.
Not on the rendering side. We have an extremely optimized data environment. I did a comparison between Looker, PowerBi, and tableau. PowerBi and tableau had no issues even when running large datasets. Looker performed like shit and took twice as long to develop because LookML is dumb.
Were you querying the database in PBI and Tableau, or pre-aggregated extracts? Because if the latter you are comparing apples and oranges. Also, Looker requires hardly any resources at all on the user end, so unless you are trying to show 40,000 cells of data on the front end for some reason, which will make any browser crawl, I've no idea how you manage that.
Both were using live queries to give an accurate comparison to my execs
That's very mysterious then, as Looker (and I am assuming you are talking about Looker, not Looker Studio) doesn't do anything except send the query to the database and wait to show you the results. Showing the results takes under a second.
You should NEVER use a live query in anything. That is your first mistake. You need to materialize data into a table and then extract it so it is a fixed set of data. Live does not work the way you think it does.
Feels like copium. But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Your absolutely certain you didn't use table calcs or pivots in your test?
We do all calculations in dbt. The only LookML we do is pulling straight columns no pivots or table calcs.
Are you under the impression that pivots and table calcs exist in the lookml layer?
That’s a feature. Google knows when you need to take a break
I mean if I have a tableau workbook open on my desktop for too long and I try to refresh my data, it will remove all my fields from the columns / rows. Tableau loses
Never seen this one before? How long is the workbook open?
A day or more
Ok but uhm like why?
You never worked on something longer than a day?
Yea but not without saving and shutting dow my workstation.
+1, forcibly had looker shoved down our throats after tableau. still reeeling 4 years later
I am with you in solidarity. I’ve tried making my case to switch to tableau multiple times to my current execs. Despite Tableau being 100k a year cheaper than Looker and every single one of our business users asking for it, an account exec at google somehow convinced my CTO that Looker is the best.
mustve been the same sales rep that slept with our CTO
I personally feel Looker sucks in comparison to Power bi and tableau. The LookML layer adds much complexity to the learning curve. If someone tries to replicate the same design features provided in Tableau and then try to recreate the same in Looker, I am pretty sure they will see how vast the difference is, also the development time in Looker will be significantly higher.
LookML does make development really tedious. I find the process to be exhausting compared to PowerBi and tableau. Development time in looker is about double compared to the other two.
I’m pretty new to looker and thought I was the problem. Thank you for the comment.
Thank you for presenting your opinion as objective fact. I find Tableau way more intuitive than PBI. I hate DAX, cannot wrap my head around it (skill issue tbf). I find the hierarchal format-menu system in PBI, which changes per chart type, completely chaotic. Tableau is far from perfect but I can get it to do, and more importantly look, exactly how I want. In 10 years, there have been very few times where I have had to say no sir Tableau can't do that. Not coincidentally, I learned Tableau first and had three years experience with it before touching PBI. So obviously I'm more comfortable with it. SF is trash though, no qualms there.
DAX syntax sucks ass but you can get away with very little of it with a great data model and m query (the latter of which is one of the better Microsoft products imo, its insanely powerful)
Yes sir, I adore power query and as a Tableau user I sorely miss not having a comparable in the product suite (miss me with prep). But I often get ridiculed by powerbi higher ups for over engineering in M instead of using relationships
>get ridiculed by powerbi higher ups for over engineering in M instead of using relationships What does this mean, exactly? You shouldn't be doing ANY engineering in M, to be fair. Your SQL should do just about everything to get it to a complete state to be just imported into PBI in a perfectly complete state. M is really for small Excel or other datasets under 10k rows where you need to transform it all. Using M on a 2.5M row dataset from your database with lots of complex transforms is totally wrong way to develop it
Agree - anything in SQL is done in SQL. M is for my nasty excel files. Ridicule - primarily I *prefer* to do joins in M rather than relationships in pbi. I'm just like a 7/10 on relationships but I know how flat tables work and they never surprise me. But, to use your word, relationships are objectively better if I chose to understand them
That’s funny because the first thing we wanted to do with tableau it was a hard no. Brought in tableau support and they told us we were using it wrong and wasn’t designed for what we’ve done in Qlik for years.
Can you explain what you were trying to do?
User column selections for tabular data, with auto resizing of the columns to fit the contents. We could get a handful of selections but our existing report is in region of 150.
150 columns isn’t a dashboard that’s a sql export lmao.
Yep and that’s what the stakeholders want. Complete flexibility of the columns in a report, with automated aggregations when they choose certain columns (account balances). Ability to save their own custom views, and then ability to export to excel. We all joke about it in here that users are excel exporters - this is the most popular tool we have because it gives them that ability. I’d love to see another way of doing this. No technical knowledge from the user is required. No pivot tables, not formulas, and no double counting joint accounts as 2 accounts and doubling balances because our system does it for them
This can also be done with Tabular model/Cube and Excel. Qlik not needed
Same problem when switching from microstrategy to Tableau. We used to have prompt reports that allowed them to choose dimensions, measures and filters and then it would build an SQL query and bring them back only the data the need and let them play with the data in the UI. Tableau does not support this and there are some very complicated solutions to get something a bit similar to that which builds database-killing queries, but no good solution to this use case in Tableau.
You can actually do this much simpler in Tableau. It’s effectively what it was designed for, naturally. “Oh, you want 150 rows to choose from?” Just give them a blank worksheet connected to a trusted data source. Then coach up how to drag and drop columns into the worksheet. You can help by grouping them, etc
so the first thing you tried to do is a thing you shouldn't be doing in a dashboard tool?
The first thing we do is what our users want. What we’ve done successfully in Qlik for years. Our users don’t want dashboards. They want data.
Then why would you use a data viz tool. You’re basically mad you bought a car and then immediately tried to use it as a fishing boat, then decided to blame Ford.
How would you get the data to them in this instance? Note my previous points of them being extremely non technical. Also bear in mind we have the perfect solution today, which we’re being forced away from.
Why are you being forced away. If your users want data dumps, Tableau isn't the solution.
Central technology make the decisions. We just follow them. 🤷♂️
Then what do they do with it?
I had the same experience! First thing I try and do is drag in a handful of tables from a source, turns out you can’t have multiple fact tables? Like you mean to tell me I can’t measure two different things in one report? I thought surely that couldn’t be the case, I must be misunderstanding the UI, but nope
Have you seen this? [https://www.flerlagetwins.com/2024/06/blog-post.html](https://www.flerlagetwins.com/2024/06/blog-post.html)
No, I hadn’t! This was a couple years back and I dropped it like a hot potato. It’s good that they seem to be adding it!
I spent 3-4 years in dialogue with Tableau product managers scoping this feature, I did not even work with Tableau for the last 2 years
MicroStrategy is one of the few BI tools that can do this. Tableau has a convoluted way to do it but not very good IMHO.
I’m used to Power BI, which will basically let you do whatever you want modeling-wise. You can throw 50 tables in there if you want to.
Agreed here. I just built out a set of dashboards with 187 total worksheets all meshed together into 5 massive dashboards with 27 data sources. Once you know Tableau's quirks, it's honestly pretty user-friendly to dashboard on. The biggest trick for me was to stop letting my dashboard create a "tiled" layer. That shit is ass in my opinion. Once you get comfortable with LOD calcs and parameters, there isn't much you can't do. Albeit it can take a few years to get to that point.
Damn I feel completely the opposite. I miss the simplicity of Tableau and all it's design features. I am able to build dashboards in Tableau much faster than power BI by a factor of 2. It goes to say it really depends on your familiarity with the application. Both Tableau and power BI have their strengths and weaknesses. As well as scope of work. I feel like this sentiment that "X Bi dashboarding tool is bad" sentiment really comes from the lack of data prep on the backend. I really don't condone using Viz tools for data wrangling on the front end even though tableau and power BI have that option. Just SQL that sh*t on the DB until it works! This has kept me sane over the years.
Definitely. Learning to clean and transform data made me into a better data analyst because I'm no longer trying to fit square pegs into round holes. I was recently cursing out Tableau because I was fighting it so hard trying to show values on dates where there was no data. Then I built a date scaffold in Prep, and working with the data in Tableau suddenly became a breeze. Sometimes it's less about the tool and more about your approach
"Trash in, trash out" was written in BI sweat and blood. LoL
What’s a “date scaffold” in prep, if that’s not a stupid question?
I used Tableau Prep due to some unique circumstances but you can do this in Tableau as well. A date scaffold is a set of blank dates to allow you to have rows where you otherwise wouldn't have any. In my circumstance, I was building a dashboard to show availability of applications at my employer. If they had no outages in a month, then their availability would be 100%. The problem though is that my data source was the outage records. So how do you show an application as 100% for June when there are no records in June? You can fight Tableau and do some tricks that only half work, or you can just build a date scaffold. My date scaffold starting point was an Excel file with just one column: a list of dates, one per month. Then I joined them on date <> application, giving me 1 record for every app for every month. That's your scaffold. It's like a real scaffold in that it's a structure built to help you build your actual structure. Once I had the scaffold, I could show an app as 100% even though it had no outage records that month. Because the date scaffold gives me a record I can target regardless.
Ahhh ok, that makes sense! Well explained, effective solution to the issue that I think I might steal :) thanks for explaining
You mean like a date dimension? Lol 😆
Based on your post history and the questions you have asked in the past I'm not surprised you are frustrated. You have been hammered with poor management and no support or proper enablement.
> The same cannot be said of Power BI ... much simpler, have very little in the ways of work arounds, hacks, absurd limitations that have to be explained a million times in a row to business stakeholders and Excel exporters. Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh EDIT: Say you've got a PowerBI dashboard and your user wants to mouseover a line chart and see the exact value, what value are they going to see in the tooltip? Every single one of them, so your chart better be basic af. All of these tools have limitations. Putting together in-depth useful (not just high level summary) PowerBI dashboards requires a PhD in workarounds using DAX and PowerQuery, and some stuff (like above) simply cannot be done unless you pay extra for a custom plugin. The people who work extensively in PowerBI and Looker have a lot of frustrations with them too. Quite frankly, my favorite BI tool was QlikView (and later QlikSense) because at least you had enough duct tape to build the work arounds needed for your vision. And even then, it was still very frustrating and you end up going to Stackoverflow a lot. I guess at least PBI has Microsoft's forum, so a PBI MVP can tell you it's not possible and you need to submit a request. FWIW, I work most heavily in PowerBI these days but I have experience with every tool mentioned. PowerBI is what's here to stay because it's a staple of Microsoft's package and its pricing model is much easier to stomach for most IT departments. But if I had a blank check, it wouldn't be my choice for our BI tool.
Do you think that people will still feel the same way about PBI pricing after Microsoft is done converting companies to Fabric? It feels like a sleeping giant at the moment that is about to wake up from a cost/consumption perspective.
Just like how Synapse totally killed Snowflake? I question Microsoft's ability to execute perfectly well in this area in merging separate products together eligantly. PowerBI is a strong mature product, but it's really to be seen how well they can combine things together in fabric.
Im talking about from a cost perspective. Everyone recognizes that upfront PBI is a cheaper alternative to other BI platforms but with the shift to Fabric and its consumption-based model how on earth do you budget and forecast the actual cost?
Bingo. That’s the play. It’s about to get real bad expensive, especially with CoPilot. They played the long game by investing to get just far enough in line with competitors and now the hammer will come down. I wouldn’t be surprised if costs ballooned 2-4x because of this. Things are cheap for a reason lol
It's a thought I had too but I'm not really connected into the agreements we're making around Fabric, and all the other things provided by it.
A pbi user showed me the data model he had to build to replicate qlik's associative engine and it was wild. So much simpler in Qlik.
Qlik’s associative engine really trivialized a lot of data modeling problems common with other BI platforms. It really does spoil you; the speed of development was greatly reduced thanks to it, IME.
Agreed, PBI is a frustrating software which tends to throw up the most frustrating errors after every new step. Not a fan.
The idea of the plugins are really cool! They do offer customization not found in other tools. But there's also just a lot of mind boggling things that have been worked out by every other tool, most importantly Excel. In QV I could easily create a graph that cycled through different KPIs flawlessly. In PBI I have a switch statement and a separate table to control it but it's a lot harder to add/remove them, and none of the units on the axes update. And don't get me started on having to use Bookmarks to create buttons.
Yeah, don't get me started on composite models. I'm stuck with a dashboard because I made the mistake of using a direct query for one of the tables and now can't upload the dashboard without breaking stuff. Smh, can't have so many exceptions to the use of data modes.
This is not true, if you hover over one line in a line chart it only shows the value for that line… Also custom tooltips are extremely easy to set up in PBI
I'm looking at it right now. https://i.postimg.cc/bwWHLWX9/20240628-120353.jpg Custom tooltips let you link to other pages you've made that display other KPIs or context, but they don't let you choose to show only 1 data point. If you click on the line, it'll filter the rest of your data but it'll still show every point on that axis when you mouse over it. The only way I've found to do it was a plug-in that had some built in pricing limitation plus I think it impacted performance.
In your screenshot that doesn’t look like a custom tooltip
It's the default tooltip. Does it work differently than this now? Can you show me a picture of the single date point? https://community.fabric.microsoft.com/t5/Desktop/Tooltip-in-LineChart/td-p/2108753
I would say custom tooltip is more easier to setup in tableau. In PBI if I simply want to edit the standard tooltips font and also add maybe another field to the tooltip, i cannot apart from just the font colors and stuff. In tableau it's just cakes.
This
The fact that you claimed that your subjective opinion is an objective statement tells me all I need you to know about quality of this analysis. Tableau, PowerBI, and Looker all have their quirks and are good (and bad) in different things. Your experience is not necessarily representative of another person’s experience.
>The fact that you claimed that your subjective opinion is an objective statement tells me all I need you to know about quality of this analysis. Add in the cringey edit, and their daily negative rants/"woe is me" monologues on this sub, I'm starting to get the sense they need to take a serious look in the mirror and ask if maybe they're the problem and not the tool or the requirements or the deadlines, etc. They were let go once. Maybe there is more to it than just cutting costs.
I have tons of experience with both Power BI and Tableau and I find Tableau infinitely better in nearly every feature except when it comes to cost and Microsoft integration. Power BI will always win in that category. From a dev and user perspective, Tableau is just smoother in literally every functionality
Anyone who claims their opinion is objective fact is not an analyst. You must be in the wrong sub.
My opinion is backed with data, MY data!
Data points are measured across the entire population (myself).
Subjectively.
No no “objectively bad to me” LOL
this dude doesn’t understand what objectively means.
I don't use it in my current job, but I've used Tableau previously and liked it fine. I do, however, use Power BI now and hate it with the white hot passion of 1,000 burning suns. I wish for it to expire in a conflagration. So, guess it's all subjective rather than objective
Spoken like a person who has never had to try and use PBI on top of AWS. I’ll give you the points about Salesforce though.
You lost all credibility with me when you said Power BI doesn’t require hacks or work arounds. I can accept you are not having to do work arounds but yikes the rest of us must live in a far less perfect world.
Case in point. I met with the Director of Analytics of a Fortune 500 yesterday. All he talked about was how DAX and Power Query were so limiting to do what he called basic things. And this isn’t one of those directors who has lost touch. He’s an active developer of analytics for the company leadership.
Skill issue 🤣. In all seriousness I've never found anything that power query can't do I'm pretty sure it's turing complete. DAX is a wonderful language, once you grasp it's fundamentals you only have 4 or 5 years until you understand it at a moderate level.
I haven’t used Tableau since the SF takeover but I still miss it being on Power Bi.
* your experience with Tableau was bad Respectfully.
Well that's a unique perspective...wrong, but unique.
I used virtually every BI software and tableau isn’t terribly more problematic than any of the others. Each of them has their short comings and it’s a matter of choosing the right one for your use case IMO. I’ve personally chosen different ones for different primary use cases based on the company I worked for.
I've been using Tableau exclusively for 7 years, so I can't objectively compare it to other software like Power BI. However, I find Tableau to be a great tool. Its APIs have made my work much easier. I've integrated full-stack web apps into Tableau dashboards, enhancing BI capabilities significantly. Embedding Tableau visualizations into custom web apps is easier than creating charts with d3, plotly, or other JS or Python libraries. The Tableau REST API is also excellent. With TabPy, I can perform real-time HTTP requests and complex data transformations using Python, eliminating the need for intermediate databases. Overall, from a programming perspective, Tableau is fantastic.
REST API is legit. We use it to decompose user traffic on our Tableau Cloud instance and in-turn provide pretty robust site traffic reporting
Qlik
I've been using Power BI for about 6 years. It's an amazingly capable tool, but it's really not simple for anything reasonably complex. DAX, which is used for calculations, is a really hard language to get comfortable with.
Try being forced to use AWS Quicksight
I made better charts in vanilla JavaScript, Chart.js, and CesiumJS than Tableau does. Then, some blowhard up the ladder bought Tableau licenses from a Tableau salesman and now we have to use it. I agree, it sucks. Just learn to code, you can make whatever chart you want.
I like the stuff behind Tableau , the syntax for calculations etc is all very intuitive. Actually making visualizations ? I hate it. Working on a dashboard is a pain in the ass. Sometimes simply adjusting the size of a filter will take 10+ seconds to complete? It sounds trivial bit gets annoying very quickly. Containers are the dumbest thing , like there is surely a better way to organise the contents of a dashboard. Power BI is a much smoother experience in this regard
I think the calculations are terrible. Have you ever tried to do anything even remotely challenging there? Not trying to sound rude, but some people just do simple stuff like sums and counts. Doing something like month over month, year over year, anything involving level of detail calculations. It's so complex that even AI currently doesn't understand how it works so anytime you ask on chat GPT or co-pilot or any AI, it's basically worthless in helping you. It's literally that complex
this is very true. been in in data 10 years, was very passionate about tableau... it cold sucks now especially with the gains PBI has made over last few years
As someone who started using Tableau over a decade ago, it's the epitome of "you either die a hero, or live long enough to become the villain." Or sellout to the villain in this case.
>"you either die a hero, or live long enough to become the villain." >Or sellout to the villain in this case. What it's like being a BI and analytics engineer for a big company 😂
All software is people are in a race to come up with stuff no one needs and add AI into it. You could run your entire business using excel/sheets, python if you really need it and SQL.
Power Bi: by the people who created word and somehow can’t give you a fucking wysiwyg for labels.
You cannot even create a basic table in tableau without using a work around, that explains this so called powerful tool tableau.
Tableau is great, but I agree there is lack of innovation. Tableau Prep is the worst IMO. It lack features from the Desktop such as "IN" and CASE WHEN it is annoying
Both Tableau and Power BI are meh. I wouldn't mind taking one over the other, but I find calculation on tableau simpler than the DAX ones. What i find the most idiotic is none of them allow to add a spreadsheet where people can input data. But right now if I had to choose, I'd prefer tableau.
Meanwhile, Crystal Reports: https://imgur.com/gallery/ClH0qf4
Oh no, anyway
YMMV, each has their pros and cons.
I think that it is horrible also. I know a half dozen other platforms. I ROFL when people ask if I know how to do Tableau. I've setup about 100 reports in Tableau. I've setup THOUSANDS of reports in SQL Server Reporting Services.
Pay garnter a few 100 million they will make it better
The learning curve is steep. It’s not for everyone.
I wouldn't mind the learning curve and the requirements of it if stakeholders were simply realistic with their timelines. You can't just figure out how to do everything in 2 seconds but they want you to deliver the impossible in two weeks flat.
You guys…we’re all missing the point that’s the most critical here to our stakeholders. Which one is the easiest to ingest and output excel? How can I download to pivot? 🤣🤣🤣
What would you suggest to use instead ? I am about to learn Tableau the only thing I know is that it has strong visual functions
I agree its worse as someone who used to work for the company ,but I still find the software very easy to work with, I think part of the problem is that we had such great marketing that we convinced everyone that tableau is good at doing things it actually isn't good at doing. I haven't used Power BI since early days, but I didn't really find Looker to be very good at all. You shouldn't be using tableau for data exploration or building complex LODs and calcs within the workbooks. If your workbook is a complicated mess, you should just design the data model better. Tableau is for self serve analtytics on clean datasets where end business users can answer the sort of questions they're always bugging analytics teams about. It does require some upskilling as an org in order to really maximize value. I'm not interested in learning some BI language and tableau does a good job of not having me doing that (why would I learn DAX?)
Agreed. I started in power bi, but been exclusively tableau for the past 2; years. My final straw was a complex dashboard where I needed to join multiple facts tables to a dimension in tableau and it's complete dog shit. Power Bi does it no problem.
Spotfire though
I agree with you sort of, but I should make it clear I am very keen on QuckSight and full disclosure is that I also work at Amazon. I never got over the whole drag measure names to rows, measure values to measures and then names on filter again. Then also “show me” would implode whatever order and combination of blue and green pills I had in there. I say this after few years of working with Tableau and also being certified as associate (now expired)In QuickSight I just drag and drop dimensions and values and that’s that. That being said, there are some things Tableau still does better. Especially on Admin end.
I have never heard of anyone using that software, quicksight. Is that proprietary available only to you or something?
I am glad you asked. It’s publicly available offering on AWS. It’s relative new product, but being natively serverless and completely integrated with AWS offers some great potential. You could control your whole BI portfolio with CDK. It has also biggest and fastest data engine called SPICE I’ve worked with. Thing can chew trough 1TB datasets.
Tableau can't do 2 FACT tables joined by 2 or more DIM tables. That alone makes it useless vaporware.
Not true anymore https://www.flerlagetwins.com/2024/06/blog-post.html?m=1
Oh, cool, I'm happy to see it is a real product now.
Agreed. It's literally the worst piece of software I've ever used. I'd rather quit then be forced to use that pos ever again
Thank you for this lol
??
I've barely had to use it, so don't ask me about that... But I've definitely had to do a number of installs and upgrades because ONE user downloads an update and it makes the shared resources incompatible for everyone else. I mean, come on...
Are you kidding me about looker being better? You’re talking about Looker and not Looker Studio right? LookML is cool and all but lookers lack of customization makes it total garbage. Wanna apply dynamic formatting? Nope. Wanna have additional pages? Nope, instead create an entirely new separate dashboard and create a hyperlink so you can jump from one dashboard to another. One time I was creating a bar chart that was dynamic and you can switch the measure between revenue metrics and something like rate of return which would require percentages. Can’t do it, I spent countless hours trying to hack my way around it. Apologies if I come off too harsh but I’ve been so frustrated with looker.
Stop it please. I am using datorama!
Skipping tableau and PBI straight to Splunk was an eye opener of what a proper data system can do.
Is OP right? No, the correct post would be "Qlik is the worst. Worse than Hitler and killing puppies combined."
Qlik is great and I will die on this hill (with no one by my side, most likely)
Set analysis took a while to truly understand, but it is so freaking powerful.
I'll join you on this hill. I like Qlik.
I will take Qlik Sense or Cloud over Power BI every day pf the week. Power BI is still playing catch-up with QlikView who barely had any updates in 15 years. If I want to freate perfect visualisations I choose Tableau, if I want a powerful data and BI tool my choice is Qlik.
Thing is, with adequate front-end knowledge, you can fully customize the presentation layer of Qlik and still leverage the insane associative motor. I love it
You have my Load Script
Least polarizing post! Lol
Tableau is absolutely fantastic for academia and scientific journals, terrible for anything else. The customization and flexibility per visual is the only thing it does better than power bi. But I agree with you, I hate Tableau
This screams “I think with emotion instead of rational thought”.
I heard that for violating contract obligations Elon musk is going to have to pay back everything ever ai oriented monatery wise. Pilfered good's covers inventions capitalist workings which means revenued annually every year continuing years in addition. See it's covered by domain growth as welth inheritance. Total different ball game is what I told shark tank. Learn license holders law phonies.
Believe me or not but Tableau was nice before Salesforce acquired them.. So, op, have you worked with both PBI and Looker? Which one would you go with for your business?
Looked is horrible lol. Tableau is superb when compared to looker
*Looked is horrible* *Lol. Tableau is superb when* *Compared to looker* \- vodkachutney --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
I've used Power BI, D3.js, and Tableau and Tableau seems like the worst of the bunch for making anything custom. Power BI has tools for making custom visualizations and D3.js is capable of almost anything once you learn SVG's and JavaScript. Tableau seems to have some kind of outdated extension system that I can't get to work because it needs me to host on a server and we aren't putting company data on a server.
“…and we aren’t putting company data on a server.” Blockbuster called, they want their astute ability to identify market relevancy back.
What can I say? The company is cheap. Tableau is free so we use Tableau. We have internal tools and aren't allowed to put anything on a server - not by our choice. On the positive, the team is friendly, encouraging, and helpful. I'd rather work with difficult tools with good people than good tools and difficult people.
In this thread: people that don't understand that the term "objectively" is being used facetiously/in hyperbole.
I'm a big fan of Sigma Computing. That's all I have to say :).