{"id":230,"date":"2017-08-11T21:13:57","date_gmt":"2017-08-11T21:13:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.datahasbyte.com\/?p=230"},"modified":"2017-08-11T21:13:57","modified_gmt":"2017-08-11T21:13:57","slug":"workout-wednesday-week-32-continuous-dates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.a-j-c.com\/welcome\/2017\/08\/11\/workout-wednesday-week-32-continuous-dates\/","title":{"rendered":"Workout Wednesday Week 32: Continuous Dates"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week’s #WorkoutWednesday challenge (available here<\/a>) from @EmmaWhyte<\/a>\u00a0involved continuous dates. Per usual I figured this to be an easy solve, one that I nearly wanted to give up on, and then all at once the light bulb goes off and we’re rolling. Here’s my solution and the necessary solves.<\/p>\n

The tricky bit with continuous dates is that, by their very nature, they move along a continuous line, but the example workbook has them stacked as discrete date parts would be. First thought here, and Year([Order Date]) to color and we’re off. Good start, next add Month([Order Date]) to Columns, switch to Discrete… and fail. Because I’ve got a Discrete Date part on color, it’s segmenting into 4 parts, not stacking. To the drawing board…<\/p>\n

The solve here was to create a custom date whereby we ‘trick’ Tableau into putting all into the same year, and because we have the Year on color, it segments into 4 lines. Here’s my custom date (you could pick any year):<\/p>\n

DATE(\"1900-\"+STR(MONTH([Order Date]))+\"-\"+STR(DAY([Order Date])))<\/pre>\n
The remaining work was rather straighforward (so I found at least), you’ll have to add back the year for the tooltip in a separate calculation, which I did like this:<\/p>\n
DATE(STR(YEAR([Order Date]))+”-“+STR(MONTH([Order Date]))+”-“+STR(DAY([Order Date])))<\/p>\n
I may have ‘cheated’ as I put my title into a separate sheet and combined in the dashboard, whereas Emma had the title in the same sheet. I find this to be the beauty of the product and challenges is, as with programming, there isn’t one ‘right’ solution – but there may be better\/worse ways of arriving at the end goal.<\/p>\n