Tableau is a series of data management programs for a wide variety of systems: desktops, servers and mobile platforms. By dragging and dropping data into its smooth, well-made interface, you can then analyse it using automatically-generated, intuitive metrics, or go deeper and use all of the program's features to analyse or organise data manually.

Doing Simple Things Well

Tableau does not provide a ton of buttons to press or switches to flip. In a way, that is a strength: the interface is designed to let you get to only the most relevant information in any data sets you provide. On the other hand, the Mobile version in particular is missing several features that heavy data analysts might consider useful, and while the Desktop version has all of the features that we considered essential to data analysis, this is not a heavyweight program. Despite that, its ultra-modern interface does require a CPU that can keep up with it; older machines will not work as well.

If You Can, You Should

Tableau does not have every possible analytics feature, and it runs slowly on older computers. On the other hand, if Tableau has all of the features you need, and you have enough processing power to run it well, it makes a great option for both data analysis and data storage. While we didn't have the chance to directly test its cloud functionality, its Desktop, Server and Mobile versions were par excellence.