Tableau Tutorials for Beginners — Segment 3

Hey dear friends! Hope you have already read and enjoyed the Segment 2 of this tutorial. In case you have not yet, please take out 10 minutes of your valuable time to understand the concepts explained in Segment 2.

You can access it in this link ( Tableau Tutorials for Beginners — Segment 2)

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In the previous tutorial we have learnt about the concepts of Continuous vs Discrete in Tableau. In today’s tutorial we will see how the Date data type behaves in both the Continuous and Discrete mode.

Whenever a Date field is dragged and dropped in the Tableau canvas, by default it gets treated as a discrete variable and appears in blue. However you can always change the Discrete to Continuous and vice versa from the field option menu. Refer to the below diagram for better clarity

Image 1 : Field Menu Option for Date Field

Take note of the below points:

• When a Date field is in Discrete mode — if you want to use it as a filter option, then it will show you only the list of specific values of dates based on which you can do the filtering. You can not choose any date in between those date values for filtering.
• When a Date field is in Continuous mode — if you want to use it as a filter option, then it will show you a range of dates as filtering option and you can choose any dates for the range.
• When a Date is in discrete mode, it will show Header whereas if it is in continuous mode then it will show an Axis for date.
• As soon as a Date is changed from Discrete to Continuous mode, the color of the field changes to Green

In the Image 1, the section which says Discrete Section is to change the form of the Date — to just month or year etc. ( the mode will still remain as discrete)

There is another option for date which is called Exact Date. Change the format to Exact Date makes the Date a continuous field and if you are plotting a chart with the Date field then the Date Axis will have all the Date values in that field and the chart will be plotted accordingly. Refer to below diagram for more clarity

Image 2 : When Exact Date option has been selected from the Field Menu option of the Order Date field

With this, we will conclude the concepts on Discrete, Continuous, Dimension and Measure. We will start with new concept in the Segment 4 of the tutorial — so keep a watch on this space.

You can access the Segment 4 of this tutorial here (Tableau Tutorial for Beginners — Segment 4)