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All in Tableau Dates
In the past, we’ve covered how to write a calculation which allows you to compare today to the same day of the year in Tableau. In that scenario, we used the day of year number for comparison. That works well if January 27th from this year should be compared to January 27th of last year (for example). However, what if you want to compare so that equal days of week are being compared?
Recently, I received an email from a blog follower wondering if a single field in Tableau could categorize data at multiple date unit levels (e.g. year, quarter and month). With a bit of calculation creativity, we were able to write a calculation which…
This might be a record short post for the OneNumber blog! I hope I can save you the five minutes I wasted writing custom string calculations trying to combine Date and Time fields in Tableau.
A student in one of my Tableau classes recently told me they were searching for a solution to one of their problems and came across my blog post Month to Date vs. Previous Month to Date in Tableau. Score!
I asked if it solved his problem and he mentioned that his use case was slightly different. Instead of answering the question, “How do month to date sales compare to previous month to date?” he was trying to answer, “How do month to date sales compare to month to date sales for each month from the past year?”
Tableau is optimized to perform date comparisons and calculations relative to a standard calendar. If your organization’s year starts on the first of a month other than January, Tableau can still handle that relatively well. The flexibility breaks down when the calendar year doesn't start on the first of the month and the comparison periods (e.g. semester or trimester) don't align with Tableau's pre-built periods (quarters, months, weeks).
Tableau date period comparisons and calculations work great as long as you use a conventional calendar. If your organization uses a non-standard calendar (e.g. your fiscal year doesn’t start on January 1st or you have comparison periods like semesters which aren’t native to Tableau), you probably need to create and integrate your own calendar with your data source.
I was recently working on a project where we wanted to compare weekly performance, but it only made sense to compare weeks once they were complete. As a result, we routinely came across situations where we wanted to compare the last full week to the previous full week.
Sometimes, when analyzing your business, you want to know how values month to date compare to this same point last month. We wrote a post about how to write these calculations in Tableau a while ago, but we’ve updated our methods and have some simpler formulas now! Check out the video below to learn the simplest way to write Month to Date and Previous Month to Date formulas.
Tableau provides flexibility when working with dates, but sometimes getting it to do exactly what you want requires a custom touch.
If you’ve ever gotten stuck writing date calculations in Tableau, this webinar is for you!
One of the most popular blog posts on the OneNumber blog was Calculating Year to Date Versus Previous Year to Date in Tableau.
Tableau doesn’t have a great native feature for comparing year to date values to the same time period from the previous year, but it can be accomplished with a few calculations!
A few months ago, a blog reader, Om Parekh, reached out to me with a question. He was working on a project where he needed to compare each day to the same day the previous year. For instance, how did the third Wednesday in February, 2020 compare to the third Wednesday in February, 2019?
It seems like just about every organization I work with has a little twist to the way they like their dashboards presented which varies slightly from the next organization. Recently, I was working with a team that largely provided their reporting on a weekly basis and displayed the Week End date in a DD-MMM format.
One of Tableau’s greatest strengths is the ability to easily and intuitively visualize historic information. When that data is broken out by date, Tableau can display the data broken out by “Date Part” or “Date Value”. This terminology and concept is unique to Tableau and provides the designer with a lot of flexibility.