Visualizing dates and times

Often in your analysis you will want to understand when something happened. You'll ask questions like:

• When did we gain the newest customers?

• What times of day have the highest call volume?

• What kinds of seasonal trends do we see in sales and profit?

Fortunately, Tableau makes this kind of visual discovery and analysis easy.

The built-in date hierarchy

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.

Tip

Cubes/OLAP connections do not allow for Tableau hierarchies. You will want to ensure that all the date hierarchies and date values that you need are defined in the cube.

To see this in action, continue with the Chapter 03  workbook, navigate to the Built-in Date Hierarchy sheet, and create a view similar to the one shown here by dragging and dropping SUM(Sales) to Rows and YEAR(Order Date) to Columns:

Note that even though the Order Date field is a date, Tableau defaulted...