Welcome to this comprehensive tutorial on creating a Yearly to Monthly Calendar Drill Down using Dynamic Zone Visibility in Tableau.

📌 What You Will Learn

🔑 Key Takeaways

🔗 Additional Resources

Calendar heatmaps are a great way to visualize time-series data over an entire calendar year. Individual days are shaded on a light-to-dark gradient based on a measure that has been added to the visualization.

Creating a heatmap for a single month in Tableau is pretty straightforward. It gets a bit more complicated when you want to view an entire year at once. In this tip, I going to show you, step-by-step, how to create a full year calendar heatmap in Tableau. The workbook is below this video to download.

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I’ve still yet to come across a really good, scalable solution for adding in the month names.

Last night at the SFBATUG meet up, I had the pleasure of giving a hands-on demo of how to create an interactive calendar in Tableau.  This is a follow up to a post I write in May 2012 detailing how to create the calendar. 

This example goes a step farther in that I’m using the calendar like a widget to control what I’m seeing on my dashboard.  What’s also cool about this method is that you can multi-select dates, something you can’t currently do with date quick filters.

Note that I also demoed how to hide a reference line behind a bar, which I wrote about here.

Finally, this dashboard is not a stellar example of design.  I threw this together quickly so that I could share it with the community promptly.

Download the workbook here.

Today I presented the information below at the monthly Cobb County School Board meeting.  As some background, the previous board approved a three-year “balanced” calendar that provides more frequent breaks throughout the year.  However, a new board was “elected” (some ran unopposed) and they decided that, despite the overwhelming evidence in support of the balanced calendar, they wanted to go back to the “traditional” calendar.

Naturally, I used Tableau to analyze the data that was provided by the county itself (some board members were using their own data which could neither be validated nor would they share).  The key points:

1. The Balanced Calendar has resulted in a 26% reduction in teacher absences for a total savings of $987K. Previously when this data has been presented, it has not factored in the additional savings that result from a $10 decrease in daily substitute pay.
   
2. The Balanced Calendar has resulted in a 4.2% reduction of student absences, with over 75% of school reporting a reduction in absences.  In the past, analysis has not considered that there were 88 schools days in 2010 compared to 85 in 2011.  Another interesting fact is that a school board member reported incorrect information.  I corrected him.
   
3. Utility cost trends are in alignment with my costs at home.  My assumption, though likely too broad, is that my utility costs are in alignment with other residents of Cobb county.

The board is supposed to vote on the calendar again today or tomorrow, but I’m not holding out hope that the board members that voted against the balanced calendar will be swayed by facts.

I closed my comments with the following from Seth Godin:

Before we invest a lot of time in evidence-based discussions, please tell us what evidence you would need to see in order to change your mind. If the honest answer is, "well, actually, there's nothing you could show me that would change my mind," you've just saved everyone a lot of time. Please don't bother having fact-less discussions.