Time Series Area Chart

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 Time Column: The temporal, or time, column to be visualized Time Grain: Granularity of the X-axis (Hourly, Daily, Weekly, etc.) Time Range: Optionally filter the datetime range
	Time-varying Metric(s) on Y-axis Drag or select the Metric(s) to be visualized on the Y-axis

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 Select any columns you want to slice / separate the time series objects by. The unique values for those columns will be used to group together values and generate each time series object.

Customization Options Series Style: by default a line is used to connect the data points Area Chart Opacity: increase or decrease to modify how clear the area underneath the line is Show Value: checkbox that enables the display of underlying numeric values if ticked Stacked Style: stack style is ideal when you have a few, non-overlapping groups in your data. The time-series lines will be "stacked" / separated from each other by the dimensions you selected. Only Total: if selected, only total numeric values are displayed on the top most line. If unselected, values are shown for each time series object. Extra Controls: if selected, enables a quick switcher of the stacking type to end-users Marker: if selected, individual data points are shown Marker Size: slider to help you select the size of the markers Show Legend: if selected, legend containing each dimension and color is shown

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:

• Rolling Window and Rolling Function
• Time Shift and Resampling