Date Filters | Which BI Tool is best with Date Selector?

Today I thought it will be good to know how the date filters/selectors works in different BI tools.

CALENDAR & SLIDER type would be the focus on this discussion.

We will compare below tools on using them as filter/selector on dashboards & see which tool wins this time.

MicroStrategy
Power BI
Tableau
Qlik

This time will definitely you will get an answer the winner 🙂 i can guarantee you on that.

MicroStrategy

First, lets take a look at “CALENDAR” type selector

Example of having “Date” filter on the dashboard targeted for line chart

Let us take a look deeper of how it looks & easy to interact with

**Option 01**: You can easily select FROM & TO Dates from the CALENDAR Picker

With above option, it is kind of static and doesn’t help for running days of business analysis. So can we do dynamic ? Let’s check it out

**Option 02**: We can enable “Dynamic Date” option to select **Plus/Minus** by **Days/Months**

So, with above option, we can make it dynamic to run based on running days for business analysis.

Another option for “Date” selector is to use “Slider” option

Easy to Setup — Requires UI improvement (Personally i feel)

Tableau

Here are the options available within Tableau w.r.t. Date Filter/Selector control to dashboard in Tableau :

By Years (Different Dynamic Options)
By Quarters (Different Dynamic Options)
By Months (Different Dynamic Options)
By Weeks (Different Dynamic Options)
By Days (Different Dynamic Options)

Not to forget, it provides below based on current date

Year to Date
Quarter to Date
Month to Date
Week to Date

Tableau provides “SLIDER” option as well but with beauty of “Choosing only Start Dates” or “Choosing only End Dates” or “Both” which is actual slider behavior

Range of Dates
Start Date
End Date
Browse Periods

Available Selector Options in Tableau – Love it

I love this “Browse Periods” option as well – quite user intuitive for data analysis

Clearly, Tableau is great in this feature from my experience.

Power BI

Slider Type Date Selector Blended with FROM/TO Date to Type as well – Cool

Let’s take a deeper look on these options

Allows to pick date from the CALENDAR Picker along with SLIDER Option

Additional Options Available for DATE Selector

Let’s see how the “Relative Date” looks like for end users

Similar like Tableau with varied options (Dynamic in Nature)

I can conclude saying here that, Power BI from Microsoft provides equivalent option to Tableau but personally i feel, might need improvement in UI experience too.

Qlik

Beauty with Qlik is within the visualization itself, it has slider to select FROM/TO Date Ranges –

Love this idea of having as slider below line chart is cool

Default Selector controls gives individual date values – doesn’t have much options

If we need have date picker , then we need to go for custom objects to include “Date Picker“

Credit: Qlik for sharing this functionality

Who’s the winner ?

Tableau – from my learning and experience – i feel the user interface, features and ease of use makes me to go with this answer.

I know, i’m an MicroStrategist & love the BI tool for it’s enterprise capabilities – i feel, there are rooms of improvement in having additional features for business users to have value from it (both from UI & feature perspective).

If you feel like to improve MicroStrategy product – login & vote for this IDEA to reach product team for future improvements

IDEA: https://community.microstrategy.com/s/idea/0872R000000bnriQAA

Power BI & Qlik is equally good and has more options than MicroStrategy.

Hope it helps you all in knowing about this DATE Selector functionality!

Enjoy Reading & Keep Learning!! Stay Healthy & Safe at Home!!

Date Filters | Which BI Tool is best with Date Selector?

1 Comment

Leave a Reply to Manoj Cancel reply