Day 1: How to make a Calendar in Tableau

So this one seems logical.  If you started tracking with the #Tableau30for30 project you've likely already seen this this snazzy dashboard/interactive calendar:

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The first time I saw this was at Tableau Customer Conference 2013 in Washington DC.  It's simple yet really cool.  So how do you make something like this?

In it's most simple form, it's just bringing together dates in a number of different formats.  To start, you need data that has some dates.  For my purposes I simply went to Excel, entered 4/1/2014, and pulled down 30 rows to 4/30/2014.  Saved the file and popped open Tableau.

After connecting to my Excel file, I right click and drag the date field (mine is called "Date") to the columns shelf.

I'm given a number of options:

We're going to go through this a couple times, but be thoughtful as you do it.  We want to show the month at the top, so this time I'll select "MONTH(Date)".

We'll do the same right click and drag to columns, this time selecting "WEEKDAY(Date)".  This will give us the names of the days of the week.  To shorten these like I did, right click on one of them and hit format.  Under the Header tab, select "Dates" and choose your favorite (I went with "Abbreviation").

Next, right click and drag the Date field, this time to the rows shelf.  When the pop up comes, go with "WEEK(Date)".  This is going to give you a different row for each week of the month.  Since I don't care to see the labels, I'm going to right click the pill on the rows self and uncheck "show header" and hide them.

Lastly I'll right click and drag "Date" to the text shelf, and select "DAY(Date)" when it pops up.  

You should now have something that looks like this:

Right click one of the numbers in the pane and select "Format", and change as you see fit.  I've added borders to the cells and panes, hidden the word "date" at the top, centered text and changed fonts.  At this point it looks like this:

And wa-la.  A calendar.  You can use this as a filter (click a date and see what happened only on that date).  Or add data directly to the calendar (red-green color scale for bad/good days based on a metric).  The possibilities are endless.  

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Like this one?  Leave a comment below. 

Many thanks!

Nelson