Tableau is a powerful data visualization tool focused on Business Intelligence and Business Analytics. It simplifies raw data into an easily understandable format and helps businesses analyze, visualize and share information.
OLAP or Online Analytical Processing is a software technology that allows analysts to have quick and consistent access to information. OLAP applications perform several functions like financial performance analysis, budgeting, and activity-based costing.
When using Tableau OLAP, data is visualized and analyzed, and the results are viewed as graphs, charts, and heat maps. The most significant benefit of Tableau software is its unparalleled capability in visualizing information. It can convert unstructured data into logical results which are interactive and appealing.
What is Tableau used for?
Tableau transforms the way in which data is used to solve problems. It enables all kinds of graphs, charts, and plots to be positioned simultaneously for visualization. Tableau does not need any special training. A non-technical person can also work with it efficiently.
Business analysts use it to analyze insights, patterns, and trends from the available data and solve a business problem. Tableau can also extract data from a database like text documents, pdf, and excel. Tableau helps businesses to make Big Data small and make that small data insightful and actionable.
It allows people to see and understand data easily. Tableau brings data from several sources together and converts them into a single source. It converts data into any format in which the user needs it. It helps to create dashboards with actionable insights that benefit the business.
Notable features of Tableau
Advanced visualizations
Collaboration and sharing
Mobile view
Revision history
Live and in-memory data
ETL refresh
Tableau can connect and extract data from any location or platform and helps the users to understand and analyze the data meaningfully.
Why do businesses choose OLAP?
Most businesses choose OLAP to build their BI solutions because it helps them get maximum benefits from data and develop an effective strategy for business development. OLAP can process vast amounts of information in a form convenient to the user. Since it is user-friendly and scalable, it suits small, medium, and large businesses.
Advantages of using OLAP for businesses
It processes users’ queries at a very high speed. All data needed to make decisions is readily available, and decisions are made rapidly without wasting much time on calculations. In OLAP, cubes represent the data, and each cell of the cube contains data regarding a specific dimension like time, sales region, product, and customer.
Another significant advantage of OLAP is the consistency of calculations and information. The results are also presented consistently and clearly, which helps users find things quickly. OLAP offers a single platform for planning, budgeting, business needs, analysis, and reporting. It is uncomplicated to use, and anyone can do it in a blink of an eye.
Using Tableau with OLAP is very beneficial to all businesses, and with a bit of creativity and extra time, users can accomplish all they want. Tableau, the Business Intelligence tool, complements OLAP software, and it supports most OLAP cubes.
The cubes speed up the analysis process, which is commonly not possible in Tableau. Business tools are needed to collect vast amounts of data and process them quickly for faster growth of the organization.
