Creating Timelines in Tableau (2024)

Eric Balash's stunning 2020 IronViz entry used collapsible containers to create a timeline in the margin. This technique allows the reader to have a "guided tour experience" where they're able to read through the story year by year in a very organized and clear manner. Eric's design style places this timeline so well providing a clean design and adds a valuable amount of detail.

Kimmy Scott designs a horizontal timeline showing highlighted events that took place during the reign of the Khmer rouge.Her viz takes the reader through a snap shot of events from 1940 - 2011. What caught our eye was her annotations. Each event has a unique, custom made annotation path leading you through the story. 

Her Data Co-Founder Jennifer Dawes created a special birthday Viz for Dr. Seuss. Her timeline is represented in a unique swirl with each mark showing a life event or a published book.The timeline was hand drawn using photoshop. The line was then loaded to the Spotify Coordinator tool to plot the points.

Her Data Co-Founder Dinushki De Livera’s 2018 IronViz entry included a timeline dot plot showing the height of the Ohio River. Through this chart you’re able to clearly see the rise in the river due to floods. A fun tidbit in this viz is the icons over to the right showing various information about times in which the river was over flowing. Before and after pictures and news stories etc. 

Zen Master, Lindsay Betzendahl included a beautiful radial timeline for a #MakeoverMonday dataset on Anthony Bourdain.This chart visualizes his appearances and gives the user the ability to color by region or by shows. Something that caught our eye is how she is showing every single day between the tours/shows and highlighting the actual show days. Her design here is very clean, attractive and gives the users an interesting swirly path to keep reading!

Zen Master Sarah Bartlett visualizes the decreasing usage of coal powered energy in Britain. She uses a vertical diverging area chart timeline to show the percentage of total fossil fuel depicted in dark gloomy colors and the total percentage of renewable energy usage in a brighter- more environmental friendly green. It is refreshing to see that countries are striving to develop the use of renewable energy and this viz shows a powerful example of that.

Her Data Co-Founder Jennifer Dawes created a horizontal timeline on the life of Ellen DeGeneres. Each circle represents a notable milestone. Her use of customized annotation lines to callout important events really stands out and give the viz a clean look.Jennifer has also creatively made these events collapsible containers with an embedded video to give the viz more life and context. This keeps the end user so involved and entertained. The simple use of color here is very meaningful and eye catching as well.

Eve Thomas visualized the history of The Nobel Prize. She designed a very interesting curvey timeline to show every Nobel Prize ever won. She creatively represents each event using a gold medal collapsible container that reveals more details about the winners and their causes. An intricate detail that caught our eye, she used collapsible containers to keep her viz clean and minimal but also how she has layout the open containers in a way that doesn't feel too cluttered and still easy to read.

Josh Tapley built his resume on Tableau! This is a great way to stand out from the crowd when applying for a job. We absolutely loved the design and use of a half circle timeline, showing his employment history. The size of the circles vary according to how long he worked in that position.

Nir Smilga‎ created a beautiful visualization showing 200 songs by the Beatles, organized and displayed by song writers per album. He creatively uses a stream graph as a timeline to show the number of songs written by each artist between 1963 and 1970. Hovering over each circle or star throughout the stream graph, you are able to learn more details about each song.