Tableau Test Drive for Raiser's Edge Reporting - Installing Tableau Desktop

With the advance in all of the BI and Analytics tools in the marketplace, I thought I would give one of the most popular a test drive:  Tableau.  Below are other posts in the series:
Part II - Connecting To RE and Planning our Dashboards
Part III - Our First Worksheet

Tableau has numerous offerings in their suite of products including Tableau Desktop, which appears to be the primary one you would 'develop' your dashboards and BI reports, Tableau Server and Tableau Online, which appear to be engines where your developed dashboards and reports can be published for consumption by others in your organization.

So lets see how easy it is to get started on Tableau Desktop.  The first step is going to the Tableau website and requesting a download of Tableau Desktop:  easy.  You can go to Tableau Desktop and click on the Try It Free link to start your download.

The Tableau Desktop webpage with the Try It Free link

The size of the download was only a little over 100 mb, so not too big.  Once you have downloaded the software, just go find the setup executable on your hard drive and double click on it. The Windows installer is launched and you get a rather simple wizard.  The first screen just allows you to view the License Agreement and to provide some minimal customization of the product.

After clicking the "Install' button, you get the typical "Installing" wizard form with a status label and progress bar.  It only takes a minute or two for the actual installation to take place.

Once the installer is completed, Tableau is launched and you can start your free trial, 'start trial later' (which I recommend if you know you can't start playing around with the tool immediately so you don't waste valuable days of your trial), or activate your product.

Wow, that was easy.  Installing Tableau Desktop was that easy.  Now comes the more difficult, and much more fun, part - creating BI and Analytics dashboards and reports.  So lets give it a spin and see how it performs and the cool features it may have.

When you first start your trial, Tableau was nice enough to have some sample "workbooks" which appear to be their "projects" that you create your dashboards and reports in.  I think these samples are actually pretty good.  In addition, there are valuable links to training videos that you can watch, which are pretty darn good as well.  

Sample workbook that  comes with Tableau Desktop

All in all, a pretty positive first impression from Tableau.  I did initially install on one of my laptops running Windows 8.1 and it would crash (the blue screen of death) due to various issues, mainly memory issues even though I have enough.  My Windows 7 laptop (ironically with less memory than the Windows 8.1) had no issues whatsoever.

Up next, lets plan out our first workbook and get connected to RE.