1) Replicate a report or chart designed in another tool:
One cannot use Tableau to exactly replicate a visualization designed using another tool. It could be a very simple visualization, but Tableau may not be meant to do that exactly or it might be too difficult to visualize. Instead of trying to replicate a report or chart, one must understand the underlying purpose of the visualization and redesign it using Tableau’s best available features. In fact, this may give a whole new perspective to the original dataset. Undoubtedly, Tableau has some great features but it is not meant to exactly mimic other viz tools.
2) Try to show tons of data on one screen with a dozen (or more) quick filters:
Sometimes the dataset in hand is quite huge with several attributes and dimensions, no doubt Tableau can visualize large datasets. However, it is up to the user to decide what is important and what is not. Visualizing all possible combinations with multiple filters can be a failure. ‘One size fits all’ does not help. Building interactive views which take a user to different desired granularity levels of detail gives a much more holistic understanding and solves any issues surrounding displaying too much info on one screen.
3) Spend way too much time on formatting:
Tableau is a quick tool to visualize your data. There could be corporate design standards that one must follow while creating visualizations using Tableau eg- Using a particular font or certain color coding. It can be fun to explore different colorful representations of an info-graphic. Tableau supports formatting through a variety of dashboard objects, controls and formatting options. However spending too much time on formatting is not advisable. Tableau is not for “pixel-perfect” reporting.
4) Connecting to already summarized data:
A summary report is a natural way for a human to read data, but not for machines. Tableau wants to connect to a RAW data format, rather than data that has been manually classified and summarized into a table. The user might think that Tableau can visualize data more effectively if it is already aggregated and summarized. But Tableau is meant to do this and we are not saving any time or making the visualization any better by feeding it summarized data. Tableau needs raw and clean data, not summarized data.
Reference:
www.theinformationlab.co.uk/2013/08/27/how-not-to-use-tableau/