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
Functionalities
Tableau offers drag and drop and other features such as multiple chart formats and mapping capabilities.
Map Functionality
The software can 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 data (NUTS codes) to be mapped automatically. Geographies can be grouped to create custom territories or custom geocoding used to extend 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), Tableau data Extract (.tds), and many other types. It also allows to connect to data using multiple pre-built connectors.
Data Type
Tableau expresses automatically data types and fields. Tableau will make use of the data type that the data source has defined if it exists, or it will choose a data type if the data source does not specify one. In Tableau, the following data types are supported;