Visualizing dates and times
Often in your analysis, you will want to understand when something happened. You'll ask questions like these:
- When did we gain the most new customers?
- What time of the day has 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 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 visualization workbook and create a view similar to the one shown in the following screenshot by dragging and dropping Sales to Rows and Order Date to Columns:
Note that even though the Order Date field is a date, Tableau defaulted to showing sales by year. Additionally...
