Quick and easy – parameters to aggregate dates


(Now with video – video uses different data as an example)

One of my favorite uses of parameters is to dynamically change date aggregations without the pesky drill symbol.  Sometimes I want to just see week or month, quarters tend to be pretty worthless.  Especially if I’m doing something discrete, I really don’t like the way Tableau breaks apart the data view.

The creation of the parameter leaves me with a very clean user experience and ensures users don’t negatively interact with the viz.

Here’s the setup – first create a parameter of data type string and type in your allowed values.  Mine is going to have week and month:

parameter1

(note I changed the casing on the words later on for look/feel)

Next create custom dates based on your primary date field.  Mine is called “Start”:

dates

Right click on the field, go to Create -> Custom date…

For the sake of this viz, I made both a Months and Weeks (both are date value).  At one point I had days (shown as “Exact”, but I abandoned it)

Last step is create the calculated field.  Right click on the parameter at the bottom, create calculated field:

dates2

Place it on your designated shelf.  You may have to do some wrangling on the field to get it to display right.  For the viz I ended up with, the field is set to “Exact Date” and “Discrete.”

Check out the final experience below:

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