When you are connected to a flat file, relational, or extracted data source, Tableau provides a robust built-in date hierarchy for any date field.
To see this in action, continue with the Chapter 3 workbook, navigate to the Built-in Date Hierarchy sheet, and create a view similar to the one that was shown by dragging and dropping Number of Patient Visits to Rows and Date of Admit to Columns. The YEAR(Date of Admit) field on Columns will have a plus sign indicator, like this:
When you click it, the hierarchy expands by adding QUARTER(Date of ...