Your discrete date field turns a smooth trend into disconnected bars

My monthly sales chart looks like separate floating bars instead of one flowing line.

BeginnerRead 4 minDoing: about 20 minutes5 steps

What you'll have at the end

A sales-over-time line chart that flows as one continuous line, because the date field driving it is set to continuous instead of discrete.

Before you start

You need

A worksheet with a date field and a sales measure already on the view, where what should read as one flowing monthly trend is instead drawing as separate marks or bars.

Not covered

Picking which period best answers the business question, or fixing dates that failed to parse in the first place: this assumes the date values are already clean and only fixes how that clean date is being grouped for the chart.

Leans on

Tableau Cheat SheetHas the discrete and continuous field definitions, plus the date functions, this fix is built on.
Data Visualization for BI Cheat SheetExplains why a moving, continuous scale is what actually makes a trend readable in the first place.

5 steps

Checked 26 Aug 2026

Part of the Tableau cookbook