Innovative Tableau

Chapter 33. How to Make a Timeline

Timelines are not an out-of-the-box chart type in Tableau, but they can serve several practical purposes for your analyses and user experience. First, you can use a timeline in Tableau as a method for showing end users when notable events occurred in the business. For example, you can provide context by lining up a timeline of marketing promotions with a trend line to see when spikes align with your marketing efforts. Second, you can use a timeline as a calendar showing upcoming dates of interest. In both use cases, you can use:

• A relative date filter in Tableau to dynamically display a subset of dates
• Add dashboard actions to link to more information about notable events/dates on the timeline

This chapter shares how to make a timeline in Tableau and how to add an optional reference line to display the current day.

How to Create a Timeline of Key Events in Tableau

To illustrate how to make a timeline in Tableau, we reverse-engineer my Where’s Ryan? visualization that we use in Chapter 31. In the dashboard, I have a timeline at the top to display the next 90 days of speaking events. The final timeline looks like this:

The trick to building a timeline in Tableau is to create a placeholder calculated field. This calculated field will eventually ...