It is an ideal tool to make impressive visualizations by first and foremost establishing a connection to the databases. That said, Tableau can connect to a wide range of data sources beginning from Oracle, AWS, to Excel and CSV files.

Tableau connects to any databases and extracts the data from it. This means Tableau can stream data from live databases to the data engine, the Desktop product. This is the space where the Data analysts or scientists play with data to generate graphs, charts, dashboards, etc.

The Tableau Reader enables sharing the dashboards thus generated as static reports.

However, when published to the Tableau Server, the end-user can be able to access the published vizzes from any location, device, or organization. The Tableau Server is essentially an enterprise platform that enables security, collaboration, distribution, and governance features.

The data analytics performed on Tableau can be described in two steps:

Step 1: Developer tool Tableau is used as a platform to create visualizations, dashboards, reports, etc. Tableau Public and Tableau Server enable these,

Step 2: Sharing tool The reports/dashboards thus generated can be shared and circulated among the groups or published publicly. Tableau Reader, Tableau Server, and Tableau Online editions help achieve this functionality.