Dates can be tricky to handle and visualize and us humans are used to reading dates in a calendar format. Luckily in tableau with a couple of cool tricks it is easy to reproduce this calendar format:
First we need to identify the hierarchy of different dates values that are required. For the structure above the following breakdown is required:
Columns: Month of Quarter, Days of the Week
Rows: Quarter, Week of Month
Now the Days of the Week and Quarter calculations can easily be calculated using the inbuilt date functions, however the month of quarter and week of month numbers will have to be calculated manually using the following calculated fields:
Now that we have all our relevant date values we can simply drag our date functions into the rows and columns pane and with a little formatting we have our calendar!
There are couple of final important points that need to be noted when making a calendar like this:
- Any dates not in the data will not appear in the calendar.
- To ensure the any aggregations are accurate, I would highly recommend adding year as a context filter – this is to ensure that any calculations only use the relevant data for that particular year in question.
That’s all for now – Have fun with it!
