Comparison of Tableau to Microsoft Access for database analysis

[Kyung Gyeong]

I just heard rumors our company is considering switching to something
called "Tableau" instead of Microsoft Access.

Googling for what it is, I foound this page.
https://www.tableau.com

Where I'm trying to make sense of the training videos.
https://www.tableau.com/learn/training?quicktabs_2=1#quicktabs-2

Can someone here advise me as to what Tableau does for databases?

[Nil]

Post by Kyung Gyeong
I just heard rumors our company is considering switching to
something called "Tableau" instead of Microsoft Access.
Googling for what it is, I foound this page.
https://www.tableau.com
Where I'm trying to make sense of the training videos.
https://www.tableau.com/learn/training?quicktabs_2=1#quicktabs-2
Can someone here advise me as to what Tableau does for databases?

It's hard to tell. Their whole site is written in that happy-horseshit
marketing spiel, and rarely comes right out and says what it is or
does. It appears to me that it's a database query and reporting tool
that's intended to link into a corporate database elsewhere than on the
local computer, although this page
(https://www.tableau.com/products/desktop#data-sources) shows Access
and Excel as possible data sources.

[Andy Burns]

Post by Kyung Gyeong
I just heard rumors our company is considering switching to something
called "Tableau" instead of Microsoft Access.

It doesn't look like something you'd use *instead* of Access, it looks
like it's a way to visualise data that you have in Access/SQL/whatever.

[Kyung Gyeong]

Post by Andy Burns
It doesn't look like something you'd use *instead* of Access, it looks
like it's a way to visualise data that you have in Access/SQL/whatever.

I played with the two week trial version and already hate it but I do want
to thank you as it does seem to be something that takes the data and does
graphs and projections so it's not a db program like access.

It's more like Excel.
So I loaded an Excel spreadsheet I had into it and output graphs &
histograms.

But I didn't see the graphs & histograms as being any better than what
Excel already does.

And worse, there was no easy way I could find to get the results back into
powerpoint or word.

I had to save them as dumb GIFs for example which didn't work for the world
map which had a number for each country in the Excel spreadsheet.

The only thing I saw in the entire program that did something that Excel
doesn't do was it populated a world map with data from an Excel spreadsheet
but that was the only thing that I could find that couldn't be done in
Excel already.

So I hope it's dead on arrival.
Is there a way to get Excel to populate a world map given a spreadsheet
with every country and a value for every country (such as population or
GDP)?

[AaronKempf.com | CareerDBA.com | FullStackWP.com]

I just don't like the price tag. it's a decent tool. But I don't think that it's competitive with SQL Server reporting services. I think that some reports should be CANNED reports, and easy to print. and I don't think that Tableau fits that need.

I think that other reports should be adhoc, like a drag and drop pivot Table, and I don't think that tableau is CLOSE to what SQL Server can do with 'SQL Server Analysis Services'.

SQL Server rocks. It's a shame you guys haven't learned that by now.