Creating a Scrollable Timeline in Tableau

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Tableau in the four years I’ve been using it, it’s that you can make it do pretty much anything. Even those things that seem “impossible” usually aren’t. This is even more the case now that we have features like set actions, parameter actions, and dashboard buttons. So, when I recently saw a scrollable timeline on the web, I knew right away that we could create this in Tableau. Here's what I created:

I was really excited about how this turned out, so, in this blog, I’ll show you how to create a scrollable timeline for yourself.

The Basics

For this tutorial, I created a data set showing each of the Presidents of the United States and the year they first took office. The data has four columns:

Year – Year the event occurred (in this case, the year the President took office).

Event – Numeric ID of the event.

Text – Short text for the event (in this case, the President’s name).

Description – Description of the even (in this case, a description from Wikipedia about the President)

We’ll start by bringing this data into Tableau. We’ll place Year on the columns shelf and create a “fake” y-axis by placing a zero literal on rows. Then we’ll show each year as a circle.

Next, we’ll duplicate the 0 pill to create a dual axis. We’ll change the first axis to a line and leave the second as circles.

Then we’ll make these a dual axis (don't forget to synchronize the axes too).

And now we have a simple timeline!

Making it Scrollable

There’s a lot crammed into that timeline so we want to make it scrollable. To do that, we’ll need to filter to sections of the timeline in small chunks at a time. We’ll start by creating a few parameters. All will be integer parameters:

Timeline Start – Year on which the visible timeline will start. I’ll default this to the very first year, 1789.

Timeline Years – Number of years we’ll show at one time on the timeline. Default: 30

Timeline End – Year on which the visible timeline will end. Default: 1818

Timeline Step – Step size (i.e. number of years we’ll jump to the left or right when we scroll). Default: 5

Now we’ll create a calculated field to act as a filter. The idea of this field is to only keep years between the Timeline Start and End years.

Year Filter

// Only keep years within the timeline dates.

IF [Year]>=[Timeline Start] AND [Year]<=[Timeline End] THEN

    "Keep"

ELSE

    "Exclude"

END

We’ll then add this as a filter, only keeping the “Keep” values.

Not bad! But if you look closely, you may notice a problem. Our goal is to show 30 years at a time. Initially that 30 year period is 1789-1818. But, our data only has the years that a President started his first term, so the timeline stops at 1817. For this to become a real timeline—with a “point” for each year—we’ll need to densify our data. So, I created another table with one column, Year and rows for each year from 1789 to 2020. I then performed a left join from this new table to the events data, as shown below.

Now when we look at our timeline, we have a point for every year.

But this creates a new problem. We have circles for every year, but we really only want a circle for each real event. So let’s create a calculated field to delineate between years with and without events.

Is Event

// Is this a real event?

IF ISNULL([Event]) THEN

    FALSE

ELSE

    TRUE

END

We’ll then drop this on the shape card, then assign a filled circle to TRUE and a blank shape (a custom shape that is 100% transparent) on FALSE:

Tip: I use these blank shapes all the time in order to make something invisible. However, if you put these shapes into a custom shape folder along with other shapes, particularly ones that are hard to see against a white background (semi-transparent or white shapes, for example), then it can be difficult to tell which shape is the blank. My suggestion is that you create a custom shape folder called “Blank” then place only that blank shape inside—that way, you’ll never get it confused with other shapes.

Now that’s more like it!

Next we need to create the user interface needed to scroll the timeline. We’ll use a sheet to create a left button and another sheet for a right button. Then we’re going to leverage parameter actions to cause the Timeline Start and Timeline End parameters to increase or decrease when one of the buttons is clicked. Let’s start with the right button. This is just a simple sheet using a shape mark type:

Note: I used a fake 0 axis here as well. Strictly speaking, this isn’t necessary, but there are times when certain functionality requires an axis, so I tend to use an axis by default.

Now we’ll create two calculated fields which will contain the values we wish to push into the Timeline Start and End parameters when the button is clicked. These calculated fields will also need to account for the possibility that we might be reaching the end of the timeline, so we’ll first create a calculation to get the last year in our data set. Then we’ll use that to make sure we don’t scroll past the last date.

Year Last

// First year in the data set.

{FIXED : MAX([Year])}

Increase Year Start

// Adjusted start year if we move right.

IF [Timeline End]+[Timeline Step] > [Year Last] THEN

    [Year Last]-[Timeline Years]-1

ELSE

    [Timeline Start]+[Timeline Step]

END

Increase Year End

// Adjusted end year if we move right.

IF [Timeline End]+[Timeline Step] > [Year Last] THEN

    [Year Last]

ELSE

    [Timeline End]+[Timeline Step]

END

So that these fields are available for use in our parameter actions, we’ll drop them on the detail card.

For the left arrow, we’ll do the same basic thing, except our calculated fields will decrease the value of each parameter, ensuring that we don’t go past the first year in the data set.

Now we’ll add all of our sheets to a dashboard.

Each button will now have to fire two parameter actions—one for both the start and end dates.

And we’ll do the same thing for the left arrow as well.

With those in place, we can click on the arrows and the timeline will move back and forth.

Selecting Events

Now that we have a functional scrolling toolbar, we need to create interactivity such that, when you click on an event, it updates the rest of the viz. In my case, I simply want to show some text describing each President. So, I’ll start by creating a sheet with the text I wish to display:

I’ll add it to the dashboard then create a filter action that filters this sheet when the user clicks on an event on the timeline.

This works pretty well, but there are a couple of problems. First, when you click on part of the line that does not have an event, you get this:

The value of the Event field is NULL and it breaks the filter action essentially clearing it and showing all values.

The second problem is that I don’t want the line (or even the circles) to be selected/highlighted when I click them. I want to use some other methods to show which event is selected (we’ll get to that in the next section). So I need to find a way to prevent the selecting of the line.

Let’s start by addressing the issue with NULL events. To address this, we’ll use a parameter action instead of a filter action. First we’ll delete the filter action we created above. Next we’ll create a parameter called Selected Event. Then we’ll create a parameter action that, when the timeline is clicked, sends the value of Event into Selected Event.

The great thing about this is that, when you click on the line where there is no event, Tableau will not write a NULL value to the parameter—it just keeps the same value as it had previously.

Finally, we’ll create a calculated field that uses the parameter to filter our text sheet.

Increase Year Start

// Show the event if it's selected in the parameter.

IF [Event]=[Selected Event] THEN

    "Keep"

ELSE

    "Exclude"

END

Add this as a filter on the text sheet, keeping only “Keep” values.

It now works perfectly when we click an event, while not doing anything strange if we click a point on the line where there is no event.

OK, now we need to fix the line selection problem. This is standard functionality when you click a mark in Tableau, but in this case, I don’t want it. So I’ll prevent it using a trick that I learned from the great Jacob Olsufka. This trick requires duplication of my data so I’ll create one more table called Toggle. This will contain one column, also called Toggle, with two rows with values 1 and 2. I’ll add this into my data model using a cross-join. A cross-join joins every record in one table with every record from another. In my case, that means all of my years will now have two records, one with Toggle = 1 and one with Toggle = 2. Cross-joins aren’t built into Tableau, but you can use join calculations with the value 1 on either side to mimic one. Note: This could also be done with a union, but I personally find the table to be a cleaner solution—though it’s also a bit more confusing (sorry!).

Having 2 of each record will allow us to initiate a filter action when the timeline is clicked, forcing it to filter over to the other toggle value. Since each toggle value has the complete data set, we won’t notice any change in the chart. Let’s start by creating a calculated field:

Toggle Next

// Switch to the next toggle

IF [Toggle]=1 THEN

    2

ELSE

    1

END

So, if the timeline sheet is currently filtered to Toggle = 1, then the above calculated field will return 2 (and vice versa). We’ll now create a filter action that feeds the Toggle Next value into the Toggle filter. To make this available to our filter action, we need to drop Toggle Next on the detail card. Then we create the filter action (it’s best to do this from the sheet, rather than the dashboard).

Now, when you click on the line (and the circles), the filter action toggles the value of the filter. This filter forces the mark selection to disappear. Pretty cool, eh?

Note: Duplicating your data isn’t always ideal. In my case, the data is small and duplicating it isn’t much of a problem. However, if you wish/need to avoid duplicating, then be sure to check out this great trick by Jonathan Drummey: Hiding Selection Borders in Tableau.

Styling It

Our timeline is turning out really nicely. And we could certainly just be done here. But I personally think the design needs some work, so let’s clean up a bit—both to help it aesthetically, but also to enhance the user experience. When searching around for ideas on how to style the timeline, I came across a “pen” on codepen.io by Amy Carter, which showed a beautiful timeline:

Note: I originally found this timeline on uicookies.com, so if you’d like to style your timeline differently, the following article is a good place to start: 28 Engaging Horizontal Timeline Examples To Copy This 2020

I really loved this design so I decided to borrow it for my timeline. A few key things I’ll point out:

1) Color – The color is amazing. Who would’ve thought to have pink on top of this dark brown background.

2) Buttons – The buttons are much more elegant than my triangles.

3) User Interface – As you click on a timeline event, a pink line is drawn from the start to the selected point. The selected point, and those between, are also colored in pink. This allows you to more clearly see which event is selected.

So, let’s try to implement all of this in our own timeline.

The first item is simple—we just need to change the colors.

I’m skipping the pink for now as we’re going to add that when we get to # 3.

For # 2 (buttons), I turned to The Noun Project, which has tons of great icons. I found some icons that were close, but none of them were exactly what I was looking for. So I decided to create my own in PowerPoint.

After adding these as custom shapes, we can use them for our buttons.

And the final piece is the user interface. As noted above, as you click on a timeline event, a pink line is drawn from the start to the selected point. The selected point, and those between, are also colored in pink. This allows you to more clearly see which event is selected. To create this, we’re first going to need a few calculated fields. The first will give us the year associated with the selected event.

Event Year

// Year of the selected event.

{FIXED : MAX(

    IF [Event]=[Selected Event] THEN

        [Year]

    END

)}

Then one to determine the shape we’ll use:

Shape

// Show different shapes for items later in the timeline than the selected event.

IF ISNULL([Event]) THEN

    "None"

ELSEIF [Year] > [Event Year] THEN

    "Future"

ELSEIF [Year] = [Event Year] THEN

    "Current"

ELSE

    "Past"

END

For each of these values, I created custom shapes in PowerPoint:

We had previously placed the Is Event field on the shape card of the second axis, but we’ll now use the Shape field instead. We’ll assign the shapes as follows. Just as we did earlier, “None” will be assigned a blank shape.

In the screenshot above, it’s difficult to tell, but the white circle is assigned to “Future”.

Now, when we select an item on the timeline, that event gets the white circle with pink outline, past events get the pink circle, and future events remain white. Next, we’ll color the line. For that, we need the following calculated field:

Color Line

// Color line differently for items later in the timeline than the selected event.

IF [Year] >= [Event Year] THEN

    "Future"

ELSE

    "Past"

END

We’ll drop this field on the color card on the first axis (the line axis). This will actually cause the line to break into two separate line segments. To avoid this, right-click the pill and change it to an attribute. Then edit the colors, assigning pink to “Past” and white to “Future”. Now, as we click on an event, the line is colored pink in the past and white in the future, making it even easier for us to see where we are on the timeline.

And we’re done!! I don't know about you, but I think this looks pretty good!

Using My Workbook as a Template

Okay, that seemed like a lot of steps, but trust me when I tell you it doesn’t take that much time to build. And, if you have a need for a nice timeline like this, I think it will be worth the effort in the end. That being said, if you’d rather not build this from scratch, you can use my workbook as a template. Here are the basic instructions:

1) Download my Excel Template.

2) On the Year sheet of the template, create a row for each year from your start date to your end date.

3) On the Events sheet, populate the Year field with the year of the event, the Event field with a sequential number, the Text field with a short name for the event, and the Description field with a longer description. You can also add other fields to this, if desired.

4) Download my Tableau workbook and connect it to the spreadsheet.

5) Update the following parameters:

Timeline Start – First year of the timeline.

Timeline Years – Number of years to show at one time.

Timeline End – Last year of the visible timeline (Timeline Start + Timeline Years - 1)

Timeline Step – Number of years you wish the timeline to jump when you click the left or right button.

With those steps, you should have an instant scrollable timeline!

Thanks so much for sticking around for this whole blog. I hope you find this useful and, as always, if you end up using this, I’d love to see it! If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments section. If you have questions that are too long or complex to be easily addressed via text-based comments, then feel free to use the contact form on the website. Thanks for reading!!

Ken Flerlage, March 9, 2020

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