How to Create Animation in Tableau

Animating your data in Tableau can transform a static chart into a dynamic story, showing how trends emerge, shift, and evolve over time. Instead of looking at a before-and-after snapshot, your audience can watch the changes unfold right before their eyes. This article provides a step-by-step guide to using Tableau’s animation feature to create compelling data visualizations.

What are Tableau Animations and Why Use Them?

Tableau’s animation feature adds visual transitions between states of a visualization. When a filter, parameter, page, or sort order changes, instead of the marks simply disappearing and reappearing, Tableau animates their movement from the old position to the new one. This seemingly small feature has a significant impact on how we interpret data.

Here’s why animations are so effective:

• Tell a Compelling Story: Animations are unparalleled for storytelling. You can show the month-by-month growth of sales regions, the shifting top-performing products each quarter, or the movement of customers across different segments. It helps your audience follow the narrative naturally.
• Track Changes Intuitively: Following a single mark (like a bar, a dot, or a country on a map) as it moves across the screen makes it much easier to understand its trajectory. Our brains are wired to track motion, making animations a highly intuitive way to spot trends, accelerations, and outliers.
• Increase Engagement: Let's be honest - moving pictures are more engaging than static ones. A well-designed animation can capture your audience's attention and make complex data far more accessible and memorable.

Imagine you're presenting quarterly sales performance. A static bar chart can show that Region B is now #1, up from #3 last quarter. An animated bar chart will actually show Region B's bar smoothly moving up past other regions, providing a much richer context for its performance.

Getting Started: Your First Tableau Animation

Enabling animations is surprisingly simple. The controls are a property of the individual worksheet, so you'll need to turn them on for each sheet where you want to see motion.

Step 1: Enabling the Animation Pane

To access the animation settings, navigate to the top menu in your Tableau worksheet and click on Format → Animations...

This will open the Animation pane on the left-hand side of your workbook, right where you typically see the Data and Analytics panes. By default, animations will be turned off for the workbook.

Step 2: Understanding the Animation Controls

Once you turn animations on, you’ll see a few simple but powerful settings that control how your visualization moves.

Worksheet-Level Settings:

• On/Off: This is the master switch for the selected worksheet. Set it to On to enable animations.
• Duration: This setting controls the speed of the transition.
• Style: This dictates how marks move in relation to each other.

Using the Pages Shelf to Drive Time-Series Animations

The most common use for animations is visualizing change over a period of time. The key to this is the Pages shelf. Think of the Pages shelf as a special type of filter that creates a sequence of "frames," with each frame representing a different value of the dimension you place on it (e.g., each year, each month, or each day).

When you play through the pages, Tableau transitions between each frame, effectively creating an animation. Let’s build a popular visualization - a bar chart race - to see it in action.

Tutorial: Building an Animated Bar Chart Race

A bar chart race shows how the rank of different categories changes over time. We’ll use Tableau’s classic Sample - Superstore dataset for this.

Step 1: Build the Basic Bar Chart

• Connect to the Sample - Superstore data source.
• Drag SUM(Sales) onto the Columns shelf.
• Drag Sub-Category onto the Rows shelf.
• Sort the chart descending by SUM(Sales) so the top performer is always at the top.

Step 2: Use the Pages Shelf for Time

• Find the Order Date dimension and drag it onto the Pages shelf.
• By default, it may appear as YEAR(Order Date). Right-click on it, hover over "More," and select "Month" (the continuous month, usually the second option: May 2015). This tells Tableau to create one "frame" for each month in the dataset.

You should now see a page control card on the right side of your view, allowing you to manually click through each month.

Step 3: Create the Rank Calculation

• Create a new calculated field (Analysis → Create Calculated Field...).
• Name it "Sales Rank" and enter the following formula:

RANK(SUM([Sales]))

• Drag this new Sales Rank field onto the Rows shelf, placing it before the Sub-Category pill.
• Right-click the Sales Rank pill and make sure it is set to Discrete (it should be blue).
• To hide the rank number and only use it for sorting, right-click the Sales Rank pill again and uncheck "Show Header."

Step 4: Enable and Configure Your Animation

1. Go to Format → Animations...
2. Set Animation to On.
3. Set the Duration to Medium (0.8 seconds) or Fast (0.5 seconds). A bar chart race often looks best when it’s a bit speedy.
4. Set the Style to Simultaneous.

Now, use the page control card and press the play button. You'll see the bars smoothly reorder themselves each month as their sales figures change!

Step 5: Add Finishing Touches

• Drag SUM(Sales) onto the Label mark to see the values.
• Drag Sub-Category onto the Color mark to give each bar a distinct, persistent color.
• Right-click an empty area in the view, select Format, go to the Lines tab, and turn off Grid Lines and Zero Lines for a cleaner look.

Best Practices for Effective Tableau Animations

Just because you can animate something doesn’t always mean you should. Here are some tips to make sure your animations clarify your data rather than confuse your audience.

1. Keep it Simple

The goal is to provide insight, not a special effects show. Avoid animating too many elements at once. Focus the animation on the most important variable in your story - usually, this is time.

2. Control the Speed

Animations that are too fast are impossible to follow, while those that are too slow can lose the viewer's attention. Test different speeds. For something with many data points changing frantically, a slower speed with trails might be better. For a simple bar chart race, a faster speed feels more energetic.

3. Provide Context

Animate in a way that viewers don't lose their bearings.

• Persistent colors: Color-coding categories (like our bar chart race) helps viewers track their favorite competitor throughout the animation.
• Use dynamic titles: Edit your title to include the Page Name (<Page Name>). This way, the title will update automatically to show the current month or year, so your audience always knows "when" they are in the data story.

4. Show History with Trails

The Page control card has a "Show history" option. This allows you to show previous "frames" of the animation as fainter marks. It’s perfect for scatter plots to reveal the historical path of a data point or for line charts to display how the line has grown over time. You can format the trails to manage their color and intensity.

5. Optimize for Performance

Animations can be resource-intensive, especially on large dashboards or with huge datasets. If your animation is lagging or appears choppy:

• Generate a Tableau Extract: Animations run much more smoothly when working with an extracted data source rather than a live connection.
• Filter Your Data: Reduce the number of marks being drawn on the screen. The fewer points Tableau has to animate, the smoother it will be.
• Keep Dashboards Lean: An animation on a worksheet that’s part of a cluttered dashboard with ten other views will perform worse than one on a simpler, focused view.

By leveraging the Pages shelf and following these best practices, you can create data visualizations that are not only informative but also genuinely captivating and easy to understand.

Final Thoughts

Tableau animations offer a simple yet incredibly powerful way to illustrate change over time, making your data stories more intuitive and engaging. By using tools like the Pages shelf and fine-tuning animation settings, you can guide your audience through complex data narratives with clarity and impact.

Ultimately, the goal of any data analysis is to find and communicate insights quickly. While building visuals in Tableau is a key skill, the process of configuring reports can still feel manual. At Graphed we help you get to the insights faster by connecting to all your data sources and allowing you to build real-time dashboards using plain English. Simply describe the chart you want to see, and our AI does the heavy lifting, turning hours of configuration into a 30-second conversation and freeing you up to focus on the story your data is trying to tell.