Recently, someone posed this question to me… now normally, I expect this question to come from a customer, but this one came from a co-worker because he was curious as to my thoughts on the topic. Now, I am of a different ilk; I am born of and from the community. People who join Tableau as employees discover the community, and many love it, follow it and get involved and inspired by the community. I came from the community where my passion was fostered, and my skills were forged… my passion pushed me to join the only company that loves Tableau as much as I do.
But, I digress… back to the question; Why Tableau?
For 20+ years I prided myself on being tool agnostic as a practitioner. I told companies I would interview with for roles that the tool didn’t matter. I’d tell them data is data and tools can be learned. When I would move from one company to the next I didn’t feel the need to find the next “Tool X” job, I was looking for the next analytic job, regardless of the tool.
What made me flip my script?
In my career, prior to Tableau, I used no fewer than 5 different tools/platforms/software packages… none of them moved me. In 2012 I got moved. I discovered Tableau. I was doing a tool bakeoff because I needed a new dashboarding platform because what the company had purchased was crap. I went to the Gartner Magic Quadrant and saw that Tableau was in the Leaders quadrant along with a couple of others. I decided I’d start there, and I downloaded Tableau first. 30 minutes later I had my first basic dashboard built and I sat back in my chair and exhaled. That experience was different… very different. I didn’t need an instruction manual, or a quick start guide… it was intuitive, and to a level, I’d never experienced before… and I didn’t download the competitors. I was all in.
So back to the original question… why Tableau?
The first thing that struck me was the speed to get anything! That first experience, with no direct training, to spend 30 minutes getting something I could show somebody was mind-blowing. The drag and drop interface, the ability to switch visualization types on the fly, the endless undo button… all of this leads to no fear in experimentation, which allows you to move fast.
The second thing was simply the ease of use. I had two occasions that really proved ease of use to me, and it was simply introducing Tableau to children. The first time was when I volunteered for a Data + Girls event here in Cleveland. These half-day sessions introduced a cohort of girls to analytics and Tableau and by the end of their sessions, they were producing dashboards! The second time I spent an afternoon with my own daughter, taught her the basics and she was off to the races. She started making her own dashboards, and by the 3rd one, she was making her own data-driven decisions. Her third dashboard was based on 3 Halloween events she attended. She collected her own data, and found that the neighborhood trick-or-treat event yielded more candy… so we stopped doing the other Halloween events! She was 8 at the time when this all happened.
The third thing is that I have seen no limits to the creativity of the Tableau user base. Obviously, inside work, we do work things, but outside of work, you have artists, who complete these beautiful pieces of work and share them with the world. We have seen these pieces of work featured at the United Nations, in print magazines and some go viral earning hundreds of thousands of views! Tableau will allow you to create whatever rests in the corners of your mind and there are endless examples of this creativity.
Lastly, and this will come as no surprise, it’s the Community. I spent the first 4 years of my Tableau journey alone, simply unaware of the power of the community. Since 2016 I have been “all in” with the community and it has driven my skills, opened new opportunities for me, and driven my career to new heights.
The Community believed that high tides raise all ships, and they want others to succeed, learn, and grow! They share their work, they write blogs, they answer questions, and they think of new ways to get people involved with community projects and mentoring initiatives. We celebrate others’ successes and encourage them in moments to challenge themselves.
The Community gives its time and talents to run user groups across the globe. They come in droves to attend Tableau Conference, and with the latest virtual event, there were over 160,000 people who attended! People are so passionate that when some talk topics didn’t get accepted to speak at Tableau Conference, they started a Community-driven virtual conference which has been running for several years now and continues to grow!
It truly is the most unique thing I’ve ever seen around a piece of software… Tableau has fans… passionate fans who ride or die with Tableau. I’ve heard stories of people finding new jobs because the company they were with decided to switch tools! Tell me another tool with that kind of loyalty! It simply doesn’t exist. This is the reason why in the Gartner Magic Quadrant that no other tool has their community mentioned as a differentiator… it’s just that powerful.
So, I pose this question to the #Datafam… what is your Why? Why Tableau? Please share your comments here!