Tips & Tricks

Hiding Date Field Drill-Down in Tableau

When a dashboard is built based on a specific date aggregation level, you can use Tableau’s custom date feature to prevent the drill-down button from appearing.

Yehwan Hwang

15 Jun 2025 • 2 min read

Tableau provides a default drill-down function for date fields, allowing users to easily change the level of date aggregation (e.g., year → quarter → month) and explore how metrics change over time.

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However, note that any custom formatting applied to the date axis will reset if the drill-down is expanded and then collapsed again.

If your dashboard is designed to compare metrics based on a fixed date level—such as year or month—this drill-down capability may confuse end users by allowing unintended changes in aggregation.

In such cases, Tableau’s Custom Date feature can be used to disable the drill-down button entirely.

By creating a custom date field with a selected aggregation level, you can display date fields without the drill-down arrow.

During this process, remember that:

Date Parts use the DATEPART function (discrete values like "January", "2024"),
Date Values use the DATETRUNC function (continuous values like "2024-01-01").

For more details on the difference between these two options, please refer to our related post on date field aggregation in Tableau.