Skip to main content Skip to complementary content

Creating time-aware charts

Time-aware charts are visualizations that use a continuous scale to provide a complete and accurate view of time-based data. That is, when you enable continuous scaling on the x-axis in a chart with date fields, data points are separated from each other by a distance relative to their associated time. As well, the axis labels are evenly separated whether or not there is data for that point and the chart view is compressed to avoid scrolling.

Information noteContinuous scale is supported for line charts, bar charts, and combo charts.

A continuous scale is most commonly used with date fields such as:

  • Second
  • Minute
  • Hour
  • Week
  • Month
  • YearMonth
  • Quarter
  • YearQuarter
  • Year
  • Date
  • Timestamp

Adding a continuous scale

Do the following:

  1. In sheet view, click @Edit in the toolbar.

  2. Click the line chart that you want to edit.

  3. In the properties panel, click the Appearance tab.
  4. In the X-axis section, check Use continuous scale.

    The chart is compressed and the data points and labels are readjusted.

Making selections in a time-aware chart

When navigating a time-aware chart, you can zoom into a smaller time span to take snapshots of the data displayed and select data values. Selections made on a time axis using range selection select all data values (even those that are not visible). Selections made on the measure axis or using lasso selections only select visible values.

Did this page help you?

If you find any issues with this page or its content – a typo, a missing step, or a technical error – let us know how we can improve!