In the previous segment, you learned about the different versions of Tableau. Now, in this segment, you will see how it compares with Excel, which is a Microsoft product.
In the forthcoming video, you will learn about the advantages and disadvantages of Tableau over Excel.
In the next segment, we will take a tour of Tableau Public, and you will be installing it on your system.
So, in the video, Sean spoke about certain differences between spreadsheets and Tableau.
The table below shows a more comprehensive list of the differences between Tableau and Microsoft Excel.
Spreadsheet | Tableau |
Data stored in cells | Data stored in tables |
Mixed data types in columns | One data type per column |
Formatting permitted | No formatting |
Limited data security and integrity | Greater security and integrity |
Easy to learn | More complicated |
Limited ability to link to other data sources | Easy to link to multiple tables and data sources |
Limited storage - 1,048,576 rows | Unlimited storage |
Slow | Fast |
Limited graphical capabilities | Nearly infinite graphical capabilities |
Designed to be human readable | Often needs to be manipulated to be human readable |
Apart from these differences, there is another important difference, which Sean will highlight in the next video.
The data that Tableau can process is in the form of structured tables. As Sean explained, data of this type is also called long data. If you compare it to pivot table data in Excel, then Excel data is more human readable and it cannot be used as input for Tableau. This data is sometimes also called wide data.