Line Mark

The line mark type is useful when you want to see trends in data over time, your data are ordered, or interpolation makes sense. Tableau displays data using lines when:

• The Mark menu is set to Automatic, and you place one or more measures on either the Columns shelf or the Rows shelf, and then plot the measures against a date dimension or a continuous dimension.
  
• You select Line from the Mark menu.
  

The data view shown below displays a date dimension as the columns of the table and a measure as the rows of the table.

With the line mark type, you can specify the drawing order of the line by placing a field on Path.
As the density of data increases, trends are often easier to see when using lines. This view shows 93 data points.

To try some hands-on exercises for building line charts, see Building Line Charts.

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