Connect the Actual Line to the Forecast Line in Tableau

By: Eric Parker

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Eric Parker lives in Seattle and has been teaching Tableau and Alteryx for 5 years. 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.

Tableau makes creating forecasts easy. It’s as simple as right-clicking in the background of a line graph and selecting “Show Forecast”. However, you’ll notice that after making that selection, the line for the historic data and the line for the forecast data are disconnected.

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I searched high and low for how to connect them and then found the answer was right under my nose the whole time.

You right-click on the forecast field and change the pill from being a Dimension to being an Attribute.

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Notice the difference:

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If you want to learn more about the attribute function, check out this blog post. In short, it changes a field from being discrete to continuous which allows two “discrete” lines to “continue” together as a single entity.

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