Tableau Software ( ) is an American interactive data visualization software company focused on business intelligence. It was founded in 2003 in Mountain View, California, and is currently headquartered in Seattle, Washington. In 2019 the company was acquired by Salesforce for $15.7 billion. At the time, this was the largest acquisition by Salesforce (a leader in the CRM field) since its foundation. It was later surpassed by Salesforce's acquisition of Slack.
The company's founders, Christian Chabot, Pat Hanrahan and Chris Stolte, were researchers at the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University. They specialized in visualization techniques for exploring and analyzing relational databases and data cubes, and started the company as a commercial outlet for research at Stanford from 1999 to 2002.
Tableau products query relational databases, online analytical processing cubes, cloud databases, and spreadsheets to generate graph-type data visualizations. The software can also extract, store, and retrieve data from an in-memory data engine.
Software products
Tableau products include:
Tableau Desktop
Tableau Server
Tableau Prep Builder (released in 2018) Tableau Vizable (consumer data visualization mobile app released in 2015) Tableau Public (free to use) Tableau Reader (free to use) Tableau Mobile Tableau Cloud Tableau Prep Tableau CRM
Functionalities
Tableau offers drag and drop and other features such as multiple chart formats and mapping capabilities.
Map functionalities
The software is able to plot latitude and longitude coordinates and connect to spatial files like Esri Shapefiles, KML, and GeoJSON to display custom geography. The built-in geo-coding allows for administrative places (country, state/province, county/district), postal codes, US Congressional Districts, US CBSA/MSA, Area Codes, Airports, and European Union statistical areas (NUTS codes) to be mapped automatically. Geographies can be grouped to create custom territories or custom geocoding used to extend existing geographic roles in the product.
Data sources
Tableau Software can connect to data sources such as regular text files (.txt, .csv), Microsoft Excel (.xlsx), Microsoft Access (.accdb), import from Tableau workbook (.tbm) or Tableau Table data Extract (.tds).
Data Type
Tableau express automatically data types and fields. Tableau will make use of the data type that the data source has defined if it exits, or it will choose a data type if the data source does not specify one. In Tableau, the following data types are supported
Text Value
Data Value
Data and time Value
Numerical Value
Geographic Values (Latitude and longitude used for maps) Boolean Values (True / False Conditions)
History
While at Stanford, founders Hanrahan and Stolte, as well as Diane Tang, created the predecessor to Tableau, named Polaris; Polaris was a data visualization software tool, built with the support of a United States Department of Energy defense program, the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI). ASCI was formed to facilitate the simulation and modeling of nuclear weapons.
Tableau was formally founded in January 2003 by Pat Hanrahan, Christian Chabot, and Chris Stolte, and moved its headquarters to the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, the following year. The company has since expanded its Fremont headquarters and announced plans in 2016 for an auxiliary campus in suburban Kirkland, Washington. A new headquarters building opened near Gas Works Park in Wallingford in March 2017 and was followed by a new building in Fremont that opened in 2018.
In August 2016, Tableau announced the appointment of Adam Selipsky as president and CEO, effective September 16, 2016, replacing co-founder Christian Chabot as CEO.
In June 2018, Tableau acquired Empirical Systems, a Cambridge, Massachusetts based artificial intelligence startup, with plans to integrate the company's technology into the Tableau platform. Tableau also announced plans to establish an office in Cambridge as a result of the deal.
On June 10, 2019, Tableau was acquired by Salesforce in an all-stock deal worth over $15 billion.
In March 2021, Tableau announced the appointment of Mark Nelson as president and CEO, replacing Adam Selipsky.
Notable Tableau employees include Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Phil Carter and computer scientist and author Leland Wilkinson.