Innovative Tableau

Chapter 81. How to Add a Date Period Notification to a Dashboard

When you show a date filter or the parameter controls for a start date and an end date, the end user can see what dates are being shown on the view. However, these filters and controls are not always shown to the end user (if you have a relative date filter showing the last 30 days, for example). Even when the dates are visible, in my experience it’s not always apparent to end users which date range is included.

This tutorial shows you how to add a date range notification to a Tableau dashboard. The following approach not only alerts end users that the date range is being filtered, but also communicates what date range is being displayed and how many days are in the selected period. The result looks like the yellow alert on the Super Sample Superstore dashboard. Note the highlighted band communicating the date range being used as well as the period in days.

In this chapter, I show you how to do this when two parameters are being used to select a date range (one for start date and one for end date). This is often my preferred approach to filtering dates because we can use the parameters in so many ways for calculations and comparisons. The steps are very similar if you prefer to use a continuous date filter. To begin, start a new worksheet.

There are a couple of calculations we need. First, a Boolean formula that ...