The date functions are useful for a variety of tasks, such as identifying the elapsed time between two events or a part of a date.

Many date functions in Tableau Public operate on dateparts. Dateparts are the small units of measurement of dates, such as a year, quarter, month, week, day, and the units of time, such as an hour, a minute, and a second. Writing date functions in Tableau Public is similar to writing date functions in ANSI SQL or Microsoft Excel with a big difference—dateparts need to be spelled out and enclosed in single quotation marks, which is a relatively simple design and use of punctuation for a programming language.

The most commonly performed analysis is the measurement of change over time, and the prevalence of date functions is high. Therefore, it is worth the time and effort to master them early on in your work with Tableau Public.

The date functions include the following functions: