With businesses becoming increasingly interdependent in the modern world, the domain of business intelligence is transforming every day.
The ease of recording data has led companies to store even the smallest invoices, hoping that they may be useful for developing business insights. This has led to the generation of data in huge reserves which can become overwhelming.
The rapid rise in data generation has created an imminent need for innovation in data analytics and processing tools.
According to a report by IBM, the business industry generates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, of which only 0.5% is analysed and used. Hence, the rest of the data is a potential gold mine of insight that remains unused.
Analysing massive amounts of data can seem complicated and tedious, however, the business intelligence (BI) industry has stepped up to the challenge and developed business intelligence tools that can uncover important metrics.
Tableau is one BI and data visualisation tool that has been dominating the industry for some years now, and adopting Tableau can revolutionize your business and help it expand.
If you are looking to join the business field or you have a business of your own that you would like to expand, you must learn about this tool; read on to find out more about the exciting features of it.
It requires less time to prepare data
According to a recent report by Forbes, data scientists spend about 80% of their time preparing data. This takes away time from activities that actually matter in improving profitability, such as analysing data, discovering insights, designing tests, and putting together cohesive strategies.
These activities can help you create factual reports that help the relevant stakeholders make accurate and profitable decisions. Tableau’s built-in tools for data connection and preparation can help analysts get data in a usable format, much faster. The time saved on data preparation can be dedicated to analysing the data to generate better insights.
Tableau software has more than 60 data connections to databases like MySQL and online tools such as Google Analytics and Salesforce. This wide variety of connections allow you to bring data from multiple sources automatically into a central place, instead of manually copying and pasting, which may lead to errors.
It can handle large amounts of data at once
Do you get worried each time you see the mountain of unprocessed data that could have been useful? Are your existing resources simply inadequate to handle vast data reserves? Are your business tools fast, but ultimately inefficient at managing a large amount of data at once? Tableau is the answer to all your concerns as it can process millions of rows of data simultaneously without making errors. This speeds up data processing without investing a lot of time and money.
It offers the flexibility to explore new things
Most BI tools need you to be precisely sure of the end-product, even before you begin, and this makes data preparation a lengthy process of trial and error. Tableau’s drag and drop interface allows you to explore new ideas and be innovative; hence, you can add your own modifications to data processing which may be more efficient.
Tableau’s easy-to-understand interface allows you to utilise your time better by finding insights rather than figuring out the technical know-how. You can play around with the data by adding different dimensions and measures, filtering out or grouping values, and detecting outliers by merely dragging and dropping the files into a single location.
Tableau also gives you the flexibility to change report elements with its built-in features.
It provides a chance for better interactivity and categorization
Even well-thought and documented reports can come back to you with more queries and modification requests. Re-drafting reports can force you to take another look at the data, which can delay important decisions.
Tableau allows different stakeholders to interact with you and have a look at various parameters on the dashboard for themselves. This system promotes transparency and reduces a lot of back-and-forth.
Tableau also offers the flexibility to classify insights into different categories and different dashboards. This way, stakeholders can access different segments at once or work on a single section at any one time without holding up the rest of the data.
It leads to a larger community that can help your business
Being a Tableau user launches you into a community full of passionate and knowledgeable people who believe that data can solve any business problem. The tool has several forums that allow you to interact with other Tableau customers to get clarity on the usage of the tool or to clear your doubts.
Irrespective of which industry you work in, Tableau can offer a seamless data analysis experience to develop better business insights; this is why Tableau is a top data visualization tool and has been adopted by many Fortune 500 companies.
If you want to learn more about Tableau, you should have a solid foundation in data analysis and big data; you can gain this knowledge through a course.
The Diploma in Data Analytics Co-op offered by the Toronto School of Management (TSoM) is a good option; the course familiarizes you with the most important concepts needed for a data-crunching job, and the co-op placement will allow you to put your knowledge into practice.
Click here to learn more about the course and kick-start your career in business intelligence or data analytics.
