[box type=”info” align=”” class=”” width=””]The following is an excerpt from the book Tableau 10 Bootcamp, Chapter 2, Interactivity – written by Joshua N. Milligan and Donabel Santos. It offers intensive training on Data Visualization and Dashboarding with Tableau 10. In this article, we will learn how to build motion charts with Tableau.[/box]
Tableau is an amazing platform for achieving incredible data discovery, analysis, and Storytelling. It allows you to build fully interactive dashboards and stories with your visualizations and insights so that you can share the data story with others.
Creating Motion Charts with Tableau
Let`s learn how to build motion charts with Tableau. A motion chart, as its name suggests, is a chart that displays the entire trail of changes in data over time by showing movement using the X and Y-axes.
It is very much similar to the doodles in our notebooks which seem to come to life after flipping through the pages. It is amazing to see the same kind of movement in action in Tableau using the Pagesshelf. It is work that feels like play. On the Pages shelf, when you drop a field, Tableau creates a sequence of pages that filters the view for each value in that field.
Tableau’s page control allows us to flip pages, enabling us to see our view come to life. With three predefined speed settings, we can control the speed of the flip. The three settings include one that relates to the slowest speed, the others to the fastest speed. We can also format the marks and show the marks or trails, or both, using page control.
In our viz, we have used a circle for marking each year. The circle that moves to a new position each year represents the specific country’s new population value. These circles are all connected by trail lines that enable us to simulate a moving time series graph by setting the mark and trail histories both to show in page control:
Let’s create an animated motion chart showing the population change over the years for a selected few countries:
- Open the Motion Chart worksheet and connect to the CO2 (Worldbank) data Source:
- Open Dimensions and drag Year to the Columns shelf.
- Open Measures and drag CO2 Emission to the Rows shelf.
- Right-click on the CO2 Emission axis, and change the title to CO2 Emission (metric tons per capita):
- In the Marks card, click on the dropdown to change the mark from Automatic to Circle.
- Open Dimensions and drag Country Name to Color in the Marks card.
- Also, drag Country Name to the Filter shelf from Dimensions
- Under the General tab of the Filter window, while the Select from list radio button is selected, select None.
- Select the Custom value list radio button, still under the General tab, and add China, Trinidad and Tobago, and United States:
- Click OK when done. This should close the Filter window.
- Open Dimensions and drag Year to Pages for adding a page control to the view.
- Click on the Show history checkbox to select it.
- Click on the drop-down beside Show history and perform the following steps:
Select All for Marks to show history for
Select Both for Show
- Using the Year page control, click on the forward arrow to play. This shows the change in the population of the three selected countries over the years.
[box type=”info” align=”” class=”” width=””]Tip – In case you ever want to loopback the animation, you can click on the dropdown on the top-right of your page control card, and select Loop Playback:[/box]
Note that Tableau Server does not support the animation effect that you see when working on motion charts with Tableau Desktop. Tableau strives for zero footprints when serving the charts and dashboards on the server so that there is no additional download to enable the functionalities. So, the play control does not work the same. No need to fret though. You can click manually on the slider and have a similar effect.
If you liked the above excerpt from the book Tableau 10 Bootcamp, check out the book to learn more data visualization techniques.
