traditionally a lot of our data has been analyzed in Excel because that's all
people had for a tool
and so they would work very hard but it wasn't working that smart.
Tableau has been a really powerful tool in
helping create this great, positive cycle of teachers and principals
asking for data,
Tableau enables us to provide it quickly, they provide feedback on what part they
liked, what they want
additional data. We're able to turn that around quickly and it just creates this
really fast cycle where we all can learn faster
and get answers a lot faster.
Excel has its place. It's great for creating spreadsheets, I mean it's a spreadsheet tool
But the beauty of Tableau is that it can then connect to that Excel data
and you can build things pretty quickly.
So one thing that we were able to do is replace
a report that used to take a whole week to create. We recreated it once in about four
hours
and now it's updated nightly from the finance system automatically
and that person has a whole week back of her job that she can do that are
actually
doing things that are impacting schools and kids.
Well you're looking at massive amounts of data and it's really hard to pick out out outliers from looking at big
spreadsheets of data, but with visualization
and all the techniques that Tableau has employed in the fundamental aspects
of the way the brain processes information
we can show just millions of points of data on one screen at a time
and instantly figure out what's going on with our processes. In Tableau its
you know typically one, two, three clicks and you're done. So you're saving a lot of time.
I think they feel a lot more empowered, they feel a lot more effective,
they're able to better spend their time doing things that are really gonna
affect our schools and our students, opposed to
repetitive tasks that weren't directly tied to student achievement.
You can create your own story along the way so
you don't forget where you were,
or you can create different views of the same information to see which one you
like best
So people don't have to spend hours looking at Excel data, mining it.
Right now we can expose what the most relevant data is
they can see the patterns and there is a lot less use of Excel in our organization since
we rolled out Tableau.
It still has a role, but we're trying to minimize that role so that people
can spend more time thinking about the problem and less time
trying to find the answers