Visualizing dates and times
In your analysis, you will often want to understand when something happened. You'll ask questions like the following:
- When did we gain the most new customers?
- Is profit trending up or down?
- What times of day have the highest call volume?
- What kinds of seasonal trends do we see in sales?
Fortunately, Tableau makes this kind of visual discovery and analysis easy. In this section, we'll look at how Tableau works with dates and some various ways you might visualize time.
Date parts, date values, and exact dates
When you are connected to a flat file, relational, or extracted data source, Tableau provides a robust built-in date hierarchy for any date field.
Cubes/OLAP connections do not allow Tableau hierarchies. You will want to ensure that all date hierarchies and date values you need are defined in the cube.
To see this in action, continue with the Chapter 3 workbook, navigate to the...
