Used For

• +**Your Excel crashes every time you try to chart 100k rows of sales data** → Tableau handles millions of rows and updates in real-time when new data comes in
• +**You spend 3 hours every Monday making the same weekly report** → Build it once, it updates automatically, and your boss can filter it themselves
• +**Your forecasting is just drawing trend lines by hand** → Built-in predictive models show you what next quarter actually looks like
• +Real-time dashboards that refresh automatically - no more "let me pull the latest numbers" in meetings
• +Drag-and-drop interface means your marketing team can build their own reports instead of bugging IT

Best For

• >Your team wastes 15 hours a week making PowerPoint charts from Excel exports
• >Executives keep asking for "just one more slice" of the same sales data
• >You have real money to spend on looking less amateur than Google Sheets

Not For

• -Teams under 20 people — you're paying $900/month minimum for features a Google Sheet could handle
• -Anyone expecting to learn it in an afternoon — budget 2-3 weeks to build anything decent
• -Companies that think $75/month per person sounds expensive — wait until you see the annual commitment and add-ons

Pairs With

• *Salesforce (where your sales data lives, and Tableau makes it look less like a spreadsheet)
• *SQL Server (or whatever database is feeding Tableau the actual data)
• *Excel (still needed for quick edits because some things are faster in a spreadsheet)
• *Slack (where people share dashboard links and complain about data being wrong)
• *Snowflake (if you're fancy and have a data warehouse instead of just databases)
• *Tableau Prep (for cleaning messy data before it hits your dashboards)
• *Microsoft Teams (where executives view dashboards during meetings and ask why numbers don't match their expectations)

The Catch

• !That $75/month Creator license? Most people need the $15 Viewer licenses too, and those add up fast for larger teams
• !You'll spend your first month fighting with data connections and joins instead of making pretty charts
• !Mobile dashboards look terrible unless you rebuild them specifically for phones — double your design time

Bottom Line

The gold standard for turning spreadsheet hell into dashboards people actually want to look at.