undefined | Better HN

0 pointsrawgabbit2y ago0 comments

To be fair, Tableau Desktop, Tableau Prep, and Tableau Cloud are great if expensive products. With Tableau Prep, you get a visual ETL tool. Being technical, I prefer SQL, but for business folks Tableau Prep is more of a REPL so they see what their actions are going to do. They can schedule these Prep flows in Tableau Cloud which will ETL and produce daily datasets which users can then interact via the dashboards on Tableau Cloud.

IMO, Excel is on the right path with out of the box connectors to Salesforce, Azure databases, etc. What it really needs is full blown SQL with REPL output so the users can see the effects of their SQL. (The way Tableau Prep does it is that it defaults to a sampling of rows to output immediate results). There used to be a Microsoft service called Excel online but it was another thing you had to buy and was super confusing. Excel needs to let users schedule their ETL/datasets in SharePoint online and then let other users subscribe to it. They can call it Excel Super+ and charge a small fortune. I am positive there are people with their wallets open.

0 comments

prometheus762y ago

That last part is almost exactly what we do with Power BI. We import tables from a SQL data warehouse into Power BI. We then build a data model (creating relationships between tables, adding calculated columns to those tables where needed, and creating measures to summarize the data). We then create reports based on those datasets. Most of our users are content with what they see in the Power BI web client.

This is the killer feature, however: power users can access those same datasets through Excel and import the entire model. All the relationships, all the calculated columns, and all the measures are there for the power users to mix and match and filter however they want in Excel. It's been a phenomenal success for our business.

jimnotgym2y ago

>This is the killer feature, however: power users can access those same datasets through Excel and import the entire model.

I had this once. Then someone decided it was 'dangerous' and locked us out. I went back to exporting the data from the ERP and loading it into Excel...because I was allowed to do that

taylodl2y ago

> I am positive there are people with their wallets open.

Take our money! The entirety of the Fortune 1000 would license it on day one!

guhidalg2y ago

> What it really needs is full blown SQL with REPL output so the users can see the effects of their SQL.

FWIW, I built a version of this at $DAYJOB. You can get REPL-like access and export to Excel using a tool like this: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/data-studio

Non-software engineers looked me like I had ten heads for suggesting that people would need to learn a modicum T-SQL to make use of it. I even volunteered to write all the views for them! The lesson learned for me is that horrible expensive ERPs/ETLs tools are never going to be replaced with Excel + a database because even the (non-software) engineers at a large company are not interested to learn how to write basic SQL statements.

rawgabbitOP2y ago

FWIW I thought Azure Data Studio was very cool.

datavirtue2y ago

DataIku

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse