Creating relative temporal calculations

There are many analytics scenarios where you may want to calculate a date-related field based on a relative date, such as today or this year. Such calculations can make your Tableau Prep flow more dynamic and each time the flow is run, Tableau Prep will evaluate the data against the current date or time period. In this recipe, we'll perform a calculation using today's date as a relative anchor. That is, if you execute the flow on July 4, our calculation will use July 4 as a relative point in time. If you execute the same flow the next day, Tableau Prep will automatically adjust to July 5. In this recipe, we'll calculate the age of support tickets for a company's helpdesk, relative to today, that is, how long a support ticket has been open.

Getting ready

To follow along with this recipe, download the Sample Files 7.5 folder from this book's GitHub repository. There, you'll find the Support Requests Extract.csv...