When you use a table schema to set a timestamp on data in your space, you're able to group values by their time value. For example, if you want to view only data points associated with things that occurred last week or last year, you can use the time component to set these.

Like color and size encodings, time component settings are saved as part of variations (coming in the next Horizon version).

With the time component you can set intervals (grouping values by week, by month, quarter, etc). You can set reference times for the slider, and you can slide through the timeline of values.