Tableau vs. Power BI Power BI is not the only tool in the marketplace for analyzing and visualizing data. There are many others out there and Tableau is one of the market leaders alongside Power BI it is also a business intelligence tool helping drive decision making and providing actionable insights from large data sets.

Like Power BI you can connect to a wide range of data sources including Excel files and it offers a good variety of chart types and customizations to help visualize your data.

You can also create interactive visuals to allow your audience to explore the data for themselves and you can build dashboards for sharing and presenting.

Like Power BI you can get access to Tableau without buying a license. You can download table or public for free and use it to create visuals on dashboards from your data. Alternatively, you can also create an online account an access Tableau online from a browser. It does not have the full functionality for customizing visuals that the Tableau public app offers, but you can still use it to connect to an Excel file create visuals and build a story using dashboards.

You can also have a trial of the full desktop version for 14 days or for a year with a student ID.

In comparison Power BI offers the full desktop version for free except to Mac users.

The browser version is used to create dashboards and share with others. However, you will need an organizational or educational email address to create an account.

One of the main differences between Tableau and Power BI free versions is how work is saved and shared.

Unless you have the full desktop license for Tableau. You cannot save your work locally or privately. Everything is stored in the cloud fully available to anyone else who logs in so you would never use any work or confidential data sets. On the plus side you can share your visuals with anyone you like.

With Power BI it's the opposite. You can store it on the desktop or in the cloud, but it's always going to be private. Even if it's on the cloud Power BI does not allow sharing at all. Unless you have paid for the full Pro license.

So what about working in Tableau? How does it differ from Power BI one of the main reasons why Tableau is so popular is the ability to drag and drop, drag and drop is used to connect to the data build the visuals and customize the visuals. It's very easy to do this using drag and drop, coloring, filtering, and many other tools are easily built into the dashboard.

Tableau offers great flexibility in how data is presented visually and this carries through right to the design of the dashboard and the story lines.

Tableau also has a great online resource library with online tutorials and documentation available for free. It also has a tableau Gallery which displays some really interesting visualizations, which you can explore.

Power BI is also a great tool for building visuals and dashboards. However, it provides query editor with the free desktop version where you can cleanse and transform your data before using it in your reports. You won't get that in the Tableau online or Tableau public app. It's a bit easier to learn if you're new to data visualization software, Excel users normally find an easy transition as it relies on some concepts that Excel users would be familiar with such as calculated columns and pivot tables.

Power BI offers a wider range of chart types, especially if you look at the Power BI Marketplace to search for your charts, which you can use online.

Let's have a quick look at how to create a basic visual using Tableau.

So I've opened the Tableau public app, and the first thing I need to do like Power BI is connect to a file. So I'm going to choose Microsoft Excel from here.

And I'll choose the file that I want Sample Superstore and click on open.

Now, there will be several worksheets in this Excel workbook. So in Tableau, I need to use drag and drop to tell which worksheet I want. So I'm just going to take the orders one and drag it here.

And that will automatically use that particular worksheet as my data source.

I'm going to go to sheet 1 down here where I'll start to build my visuals.

So in Tableau, we use drag and drop and we bring the fields to either a column heading or a row heading. So for example, I might choose to take segment and drag it as a column heading up here.

And then I'll take a numeric field such as sales and drag it to a row heading up here and I immediately get a column chart.

I can bring in another field. So I might just go up to the top here and bring in category. And if I bring it up for instance as a column heading you see my data is now a broken down not just by segment, but also by each of the three categories.

I can easily switch columns up here and start some swap rows and columns.

So if I do that I can look at my data different way. And this is one of the mean differences between Power BI and Tableau that we can easily rearrange our layout in Tableau and experiment with how we might look at the visuals. So, for example, I could take segment and drag it down as a color over here instead.

And again, I get a slightly different look.

Over here to the right. We have a range of chart types. Maybe not as many as Power BI but what's nice here is it will give me only the ones that are maybe suitable to the data that I'm actually using.

So I'll change that to a column chart there quite easily.