August 2021
Intermediate to advanced
575 pages
13h 31m
English
Content preview from Tableau Strategies
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Chapter 4. Working with Time
When we were debating the content of this book, no chapter contained more examples than this one. We had so many examples about time that we added them in practically all chapters—including earlier ones.
What makes time interesting is that we can have a single column in our data related to time, and it makes our data extremely flexible to analyze. This is because time data is naturally hierarchical. Whether seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, quarters, or years, a column including time data gives you flexibility no other column of data will have.
In Chapter 3, we discussed categorical data. Categorical data is ideal for making comparisons. One underlying assumption about all comparisons is consistency. When we, the developers, visualize two non-time-based values, our audience assumes that we are making comparisons that are appropriate. Your audience probably assumes they are the same time period.
Imagine you are doing call-center analytics and are comparing total calls. If today is May 17, 2020, you probably wouldn’t want to compare total calls in 2019 to 2020 because they are two, much different lengths! Whether we are trying to compare year-to-date from the current year, or comparing one month’s performance to the same month a year ago, our audience assumes consistency with time periods—it’s practically an unspoken contract between the developer and the user.
The goal of this chapter is to discuss the natural hierarchy of dates and datetimes ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.