Today, we will differentiate between discrete and continuous dates. We will discuss when to use each type to explore and explain your data in Tableau. After this lesson, you will be able to explain the difference between these date types, and how to identify the date type within Tableau. Let me show you what I mean. The concepts of discrete and continuous dates in Tableau are so important that if not clearly understood can definitely cause a lot of confusion with your analyses. In Tableau, dates are special. For the most part, once a field is identified as a date, Tableau automatically creates a date hierarchy. The date field will allow you to drill down from year to quarter, to month, to day. Dates can also either be discrete or continuous. It completely depends on how you want to visualize your data, or how you want to analyze your data. Using our superstore dataset, lets drag our order date field to the columns shelf. By default, when you drag a date over to either your column or row shelf, you will get a year, date field, blue pill. A blue pill means a date field is discrete. Which means, distinct values and this will produce a header for us. The header shows distinct values for each year. If your analysis requires you to have discrete marks that can be sorted, you would use the field as discrete which will be colored blue on the view. Tableau dates can also be continuous. A continuous date will be manifested as a green pill which means, contiguous unbroken values in a range which means this will generate an axis for us. In this case, time in sequence. 2009 will always come before 2010 and so forth. If we drag our ship date field to the columns shelf, you will get a year, ship date, green pill. As you can see, Tableau recognizes this as it continues date field and produces a continuous state access for us instead of headers as we saw with discrete date fields. If you know that you want to look at trends over a continuous period of time, you would want to use a continuous date which would be colored green on the view. Okay. Now that you understand the difference between discrete and continued dates, and how to identify them in Tableau, we will cover date hierarchies and how to change your date fields in the next lesson. See you there.