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The Time Series Area Chart visualization type is best used for understanding how ratios, proportions, or percentages change over time. Here are some examples of different area charts:
Reference Content
If you're new to visualizing data in Preset, we recommend the following reference articles:
- Creating a Chart: A walkthrough of the overall process of chart selection and creation.
- Using Preset Explore: How to work with the Explore page, the primary interface used when creating a chart.
Creating a Time Series Area Chart
Preset currently has a few options for area charts in the visualization picker:
- Time-series Area Chart
- Area Chart
We strongly recommend using the Time-series Area Chart visualization type, as it’s newer and supports more features.
To create a Time-series Area chart, you need to define the following values:
- the column you want as the temporal X-axis
- the metric(s) you want visualized on the y-axis
- the column(s) you want the metric(s) to be grouped / categorized by
These are all defined in the Data tab within Explore.
Simple Area Chart (no dimensions)
Below is a very simple area chart that shows a single metric varying over time.
Here's an explanation of the selections we made in the chart builder interface to generate this chart.
![]() | Temporal X-axis
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![]() | Time-varying Metric(s) on Y-axis
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Here's the SQL query that Preset generated:
SELECT DATE_TRUNC('DAY', started_at) AS "started_at",
count(DISTINCT ride_id) AS "COUNT_DISTINCT(ride_id)"
FROM dbt_smukherjee.citibike_trips
WHERE started_at >= '2022-04-01 00:00:00.000000'
AND started_at < '2022-05-01 00:00:00.000000'
GROUP BY DATE_TRUNC('DAY', started_at)
ORDER BY "COUNT_DISTINCT(ride_id)" DESC
LIMIT 10000
This hopefully helps you understand the mapping from the chart builder options above to the final generated SQL query.
Area Chart (with dimensions)
Below is a similar chart to the one above but with a dimension (rider type) added.
To generate this chart, we re-used the same selections from the first chart but made the following, additional selections:
![]() | Dimensions
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![]() | Customization Options
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Here's the SQL query that Preset generated:
SELECT DATE_TRUNC('DAY', started_at) AS "started_at",
member_casual AS "member_casual",
count(DISTINCT ride_id) AS "COUNT_DISTINCT(ride_id)"
FROM dbt_smukherjee.citibike_trips
WHERE started_at >= '2022-04-01 00:00:00.000000'
AND started_at < '2022-05-01 00:00:00.000000'
GROUP BY DATE_TRUNC('DAY', started_at),
member_casual
ORDER BY "COUNT_DISTINCT(ride_id)" DESC
LIMIT 10000
Advanced Analytics
As with most time-series visualizations in Preset, the Time-series Area Chart supports Advanced Analytics features like: