Build a Selected vs. Comparison Date Period Filter in Tableau

By: Eric Parker

Eric Parker lives in Seattle and has been teaching Tableau and Alteryx since 2014. He's helped thousands of students solve their most pressing problems. If you have a question, feel free to reach out to him directly via email. You can also sign up for a Tableau Office Hour to work with him directly!

Hey everyone!

This week’s video is a sequel to a post from January where we covered how to build a custom date filter for a Tableau dashboard driven by a parameter.

You can check that post out here.

This video covers how you can create a parameter which is used in a Tableau dashboard to control two date ranges at once, a “selected period” (e.g. month to date) and a “comparison period” (e.g. previous month to date).

This approach is extremely useful when your user has several time periods they want to cycle through, and they want period over period comparisons for each of the possible time periods. Summary tiles, bar charts, trending lines used for comparison are great landing spots for this method.

This video provides an overview of how to use this approach, but it doesn’t cover every possible scenario. If you have questions about how to apply this or how to write a formula for a specific date period, feel free to drop a comment below and we’ll help you out!

Want to download the Tableau workbook I built during the video? You can download it here!

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