3 ms·

Given your background in computational journalism (and teaching students to use python) I'm curious what you find difficult about Tableau?

• danso 11y ago
  I think it's about as difficult as it needs to be...in that it purports to be an interactive visualization builder that also serves as a self-hosted visualization player, as well as a kind of database/spreadsheet hybrid (or at least, a hookup between those kinds of things)...for non-technical users who need all of those things, all at once...Tableau is probably the best solution. But I usually only need one of those things at a time...or, that's how I approach my data problems: work with it in SQL/Excel and export into a portable format (i.e. JSOn or CSV) that a data visualization tool can make do with, whether that data viz tool is just, well, Excel, or ggplot2, or D3, if I need a web interactive. And I know how to upload/host my own web content. So Tableau is difficult because it's an all-in-one package with a lot of moving parts...and I rarely need all of those moving parts. While I don't use Tableau myself, I know many people who do, and generally they use it because they don't know how to do web things, period...i.e. Tableau's web charts "just work", once you learn how to build them. Of course, "just works" is a moving target in this day of responsive web and AMP and non-Web platforms (i.e. Facebook Instant Articles)...media publications that produce Tableau viz are going to have to find a workaround, or hope that Tableau continues to innovate in making their viz packages portable.