Custom dates allow users to define the level of granularity and format of the date field according to their specific needs based on existing date fields in the data.

When I first started using #Tableau, I assumed that blue meant dimensions and green meant measures. They don’t.

Blue means Discrete
Green means Continuous

It took me a couple of years to get my head around this most foundational concept in Tableau.

Dimensions and measures are merely a way that Tableau organizes the data.

And if you only take away one thing from this video, this is it:

• Blue things GROUP your data
• Green things COUNT your data
• Dimensions SPLIT up the view
• Measures FILL the view

I've spent years teaching people what blue and green mean in Tableau and I keep coming up with new methods. In this video, I’ll explain the entire concept to you.

Let's say you have a chart with 1 dimension and 3 measures. You want to make sorting the bar chart by any of the measures as easy as possible. In this tip, I show you how to use parameter actions to sort the bar charts based on the measure you select.

One of the things I really love about teaching at The Data School is the opportunity I get to learn from them. Because really, no one learns more than the teacher.

A couple weeks ago, Andrew Lehm Brian Scally asked me how he could make one State a single color while having all of the others based on a measure. Basically, we wanted to be able to combine discrete and continuous colors on a single map.

This is quite simple if you know how to layer maps and take advantage of multiple marks cards. I show you how to do just that in this week's tip.

Enjoy!

Emma sure can be devious! Don't let that smile of hers trick you. Today her challenge was to create this chart:


Her requirements are pretty straightforward. I was able to get everything quickly with the exception of the month labels on the x-axis.

FIRST ATTEMPT

To do the line chart, I created a Day of Year calc and plotted that on the x-axis. Notice this results in the day number on the scale.

SECOND ATTEMPT

To format the scale, I first changed the number format to mmm to give me month abbreviations. That gets me close, but some months are missing and the months are labeled at the middle of the month whereas Emma's are labeled at the start of the month.

THIRD ATTEMPT

I sent Emma a message with a few questions, basically because I was stuck. All she said was:

You'll have to re-think the date you have on the x-axis so you can also colour by year.

What does that even mean? I'm beginning to get a sense for the sort of torture I put people through. Ok, so I somehow need to get my x-axis to act like a date, yet still be able to show every day for each year in the view. I also need it to only be month and day. Hmmm: Hey Google, can you help?

Yes indeed! I searched for "tableau month and day of year" and the second search result took me to the Forums which had exactly the question I was asking. The brilliant Jonathan Drummey came up with this formula:

DATE(DATEADD('day',DATEPART('day',[Date]),DATEADD('month',DATEPART('month',[Date])-1,#1903-12-31#)))

Sweet! All I needed to do was swap out [Date] for [Order Date] and I was good to go. Now I have the exact result I needed.

Awesome challenge! I love learning something new! Here's my final product.

This week's video is an extension of the great blog post by Kevin Taylor on the Tableau blog about how to create full year heatmap calendars. This video shows you how to add month labels to the visualisation.

In this week's Tableau Tip Tuesday, I show you the impact that discrete and continuous pills have on your tick marks and gridlines. This is very important because, if not used properly, you could easily mislead your audience.