Tableau vs. Power Pivot Part 1: Basic Functionality

Today, we will begin a new series comparing two of the top self-service BI tools on the market, Tableau and Power Pivot.  Most people would say that Tableau is a "visualization" tool and Power Pivot is a "modeling" tool.  However, is this really true?  That's what we're here to find out.  We're going to put many of the features of Tableau up against Power Pivot, and vice-versa, to see what they can really do.  This type of examination was done about three years ago.  Click here if you would like to read it.  Many of the flaws listed for Tableau have been worked out in the newer releases, while Power Pivot has not gotten the same treatment.  This is a major issue when comparing purchased products to free products.  However, our examination is from the user's perspective.  This means that current and future functionality must be considered, as well as pricing.  As usual, we will use the Superstore Sales sample data set from Tableau.

Data Connections:

Power Pivot can connect to the following sources:

• Microsoft SQL Server
• Microsoft SQL Azure
• Microsoft SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse
• Microsoft Access
• Oracle
• Teradata
• Sybase
• Informix
• IBM DB2
• Microsoft Analysis Services
• Microsoft Reporting Services
• Windows Azure Marketplace
• Microsoft Excel
• Text File
• OData
• Data Feeds
• OLEDB/ODBC

Tableau can connect to the following sources:

• Microsoft Access
• Microsoft Excel
• Text File
• Actian Vectorwise
• Aster Database
• Cloudera Hadoop
• DataStax Enterprise
• EMC Greenplum
• Firebird
• Google Analytics
• Google BigQuery
• Hortonworks Hadoop Hive
• HP Vertica
• IBM DB2
• IBM Netezza
• MapR Hadoop Hive
• Microsoft Analysis Services
• Microsoft PowerPivot
• Microsoft SQL Server
• MySQL
• OData
• Oracle
• Oracle Essbase
• ParAccel
• PostgreSQL
• Progress OpenEdge
• Salesforce
• SAP HANA
• SAP Netweaver Business Warehouse
• SAP Sybase IQ
• Teradata
• Windows Azure Marketplace
• ODBC

It doesn't take long to see that Tableau can connect to everything that Power Pivot can, plus a lot more.  Tableau can even connect to Power Pivot, while the reverse would require copy-pasting into Excel first.  Power Pivot seems to focus on Microsoft products almost exclusively.  They added connectivity to some of their major competitors, such as Oracle and Teradata, but not much else.  This seems to be the advantage of a purchased stand-alone product over a free add-in.  In fairness, you could connect to some, maybe even most, of these data sources with another type of connector and a little ingenuity.  However, this is a test of "BASIC" functionality.  Anything requiring advanced knowledge is off-limits for now.

Winner: Tableau

Quick Answers from Clean Data

This section will examine how quickly a user can get basic information about clean data using these programs.  We will assume that the data can be easily pulled into these programs.  To keep it simple, let's get Profit by Region.

Profit by Region (Power Pivot)

With Power Pivots simple drag-and-drop interface, this took a couple of seconds.

Profit by Region (Tableau)

Ditto for Tableau.  I will give Power Pivot one advantage in that it automatically gives you totals and subtotals while Tableau does not.  However, Power Pivot says "Row Labels" instead of "Region" which detracts from the readability.  All in all, this was a very simple task in both tools.

Winner: Tie

EDIT: The following was pointed out by Shawn Wallwork: Even though Power Pivot labels the "Row Labels", Tableau does not label "Sum of Profit" at all.  With this new information, we must posthumously change the winner to Power Pivot.

Basic Typecasting

In this section, we will look at how each program handles changing data types.  We will do two things here.  First, we will change a numeric to a currency.  Then, we will change a string version of a number to a number.

Decimal to Currency (Power Pivot)

This was just a couple of clicks away in Power Pivot.

Decimal to Currency (Tableau)

This was slightly more complex in Tableau because we had to go through two menus to get here.  To be clear, Power Pivot has a Currency data type, while Tableau does not.  Tableau simply considers the data to be numeric and Currency is a display type.  If we were to change the display type to Currency in Power Pivot, we would have to go through the Excel Format Font options, which would be just as complex as Tableau.  We don't see why having a Currency data type is important (All formulas will see it as a number!).  Therefore, we will consider this part a draw.  For future reference, unnecessary features will not grant you extra credit from this council.

Now, let's look at how easy it is to actually change a data type in these tools.  Let's see how we would change a text field to a decimal.

Text to Decimal (Power Pivot)

Once again, the handy data type drop-down saves us again.  Power Pivot completed this task in a couple of clicks.

Text to Decimal (Tableau)

Ditto again for Tableau.  It has the same menu feature as Power Pivot.  However, when you cast a measure to a dimension, or vice-versa, in Tableau, you have to manually drag the field to the appropriate shelf, which is one extra step that Power Pivot does not have.  Therefore, Power Pivot is better at this (by a hair).

Winner: Power Pivot

We hope you enjoyed Part 1 of our series on Tableau vs. Power Pivot.  As a simple recap, Tableau destroyed Power Pivot with its ability to easily connect to different data sources.  However, Power Pivot edged out Tableau in its ability to get quick answers from clean data and typecast fields.  The series will get more intense from here on out.  Thanks for reading.  We hope you found this informative.

Brad Llewellyn

Associate Data Analytics Consultant

Mariner, LLC

llewellyn.wb@gmail.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradllewellyn