As time permits, I'm going back through some of the Workout Wednesday challenges that I've yet to complete. I'm starting with those that will help me most as a teacher to impart what I learn on those that I have the pleasure to train at The Data School.

For week 3, Lorna Brown challenged us to create a viz that shows the number of orders by hour of the day that allows the user to swap between day of the month and weekday.

In her solution, she chose to create two sheets, one for the day of the month and another for weekdays. I didn't know that when I tackled the challenge so I proceeded down the route of doing it all in one sheet. Success!

I did a couple things differently than Lorna:

1. I combined the order date and time into a string calculation and then used the DATEPARSE function to make it a date/time field.
2. The size of my circles depends on the option selected in the parameter. For day of the month, the size is the number of orders. For weekday, I have them set to a fixed size. I chose to make them a fixed size because otherwise the circles become way too big for the view.
3. I used only one sheet.
4. I am not showing a tooltip when there are no orders.

Tableau 10.2 is bringing us a new date parse feature. I had two perfect uses cases for this to give it a test. The first is file of WhatsApp messages that requires both splitting and a dateparse. Previously this had to be done either in Alteryx or via a split, then a complicated calculation.

The second example is the data set used in Makeover Monday week 3. If I had the dateparse feature when I created the Tableau extract, I wouldn’t have messed up the data for everyone.

No workbook to accompany the video this week. This short video itself should give you a good idea for how dateparse works.