Innovative Tableau

Chapter 80. How to Highlight Data Points in a Custom Date Range

This tutorial illustrates how to add a highlighter to a custom date range selected by an end user. The highlighter lies over the data points corresponding with the selected range of dates. This technique helps you and your dashboard’s users to see the marks in the selected date range in context of the other marks on the view and is an easy way to enhance the design of a line graph. One of the best parts about the following approach is that it does not require you to use the dual axis, leaving some flexibility to add even more context or aesthetic improvements to the graph.

To highlight the data points in a custom date range, let’s use a combination of Tableau parameters and reference lines. Just as with Chapters 78 and 79, let’s create a sales by continuous month line graph using the Sample – Superstore dataset as our foundation:

Next, set up a parameter with a data type of Date. This first parameter will eventually be used to select the beginning of the highlighted range. Here’s how it looks after setting it up and choosing 7/1/2023 as the date:

We also need to create a parameter that we can use to select the end of the highlighted date range. Because we already made a parameter with a data type of Date, you can ...