Helping you understand the Tableau license and product list.

Have you ever visited Tableau to find more information about their products? You may have heard of Tableau Creator, Explorer, and Viewer; however, those are not actual products, but rather, role-based licenses. They give you different products and capabilities on the platform. To have the right combination of Tableau’s offerings for you and your organization, it is important to understand the functionalities and limitations of each.

Confused? Don’t worry! We at IT RACE Business Solutions are tech geeks – in other words, we love technology. However, we never purchase new or existing technologies without first learning about it and fully understanding our needs and requirements. Therefore, we would never recommend or push you to do the same! We believe Tableau is a great investment to see and understand your data; therefore, we want to help explain each Tableau product to help you make the right decision.

Tableau Desktop

Tableau Desktop allows for authoring of content for visual analytics and data exploration. Perform visual analytics with multiple data sources, using drag and drop actions. Tableau Desktop enables you to explore the data and come up with new, visual, ways to answer important business questions. Furthermore, Desktop provides the capability to create interactive dashboards for guided analytics and stories. It can also publish to a server or online environment so the rest of the organization can leverage your work. This application requires Windows or a Mac computer.

Tableau Prep

Tableau Prep refers to two products: Prep Builder, to help you build data flows, and Prep Conductor, to schedule, monitor, and manage flows across the organization. Prep’s main purpose is as an ETL (extract, transform, load) tool to get data ready for analysis. It allows you to visually combine data from multiple data sources. Moreover, you can clean data, and publish data sources to serve as a single source of truth for your organization. Prep Builder is locally installed, while Prep Conductor is browser based.

Tableau Server and Online

Share and collaborate with your organization with Tableau Server and Tableau Online by hosting workbooks, data sources, prep flows, and data extracts published through Tableau Prep or Desktop. Live connections can bring real-time data to Dashboards and workbooks. Otherwise, data extracts can be scheduled to refresh as often as every 15 mins. Furthermore, these products include productivity and efficiency improvements by allowing you to subscribe to a workbook or dashboard. Tableau can send automated and scheduled emails with your data and a link to your dashboard. Furthermore, Tableau Server/Online can send data alerts when conditions are met – like, when revenue reaches new record highs.