Do you sometimes have the idea of creating a timeline in tableau, showing the development or evolution of the values through years? It is practical to have the years/times of event showed in your dashboard. Here are several examples of that I found in Tableau Publish.

Sometimes, you can use your time values in the timeline as a filter for the dashboard. The last days I was trying to do a viz using TED talk dataset. It was the first time I had the idea of creating a timeline, and I figured out a simple way to do a basic one. So, in case you also haven’t done a timeline before, let’s do this one together.

1.First you need a “Placeholder”.

It could be, of course, called by any other name. We need here an aggregation of 0.

2. Your “Placeholder” should go to the rows, and your Date to Column.

Here I want a discrete value for each year.

3. In the Marks Card:

Choose Circle, because I want each circle to represent a year. You could also choose Shapes and pick a cool symbol for your marks.

Also, put your date value to Label. The easiest way of doing so is to right click + drag your Pill from Columns to Label.

4. In Format, modify your Zero line.

It will be in the background connecting all the dots together. In this part you can play around with that to get the shape and colors you wish.

And now, we are done! As I said, here is a very basic way of doing a timeline. There is many other ways to play around with that. Hope you learned something new from this post.

Good luck and have fun!