Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Once we've decided that one of these features will serve our purposes, we can decide how to
best implement it, and make use of the tutorials in this chapter to do so.
Animating Dashboards
If we return to our Internet usage study from
Chapter 13
,
we can make a pretty good case
that the real story is how fast the Internet has taken root in many countries over the past two
decades. The story, then, has to do with change over time. Our timeline conveys that change
over time at a glance, but perhaps there would be some value in allowing our audience to
watch the growth unfold.
What value could there be in animating data? Well, we're certainly wired to be very attentive
to objects in motion, and we tend to have a much more visceral or emotional reaction to
events in motion as opposed to static images. I don't mean to say, by the way, that we should
always
make pixels dance around on the screen. But if the emergence of some relationship
over time is at the core of our message, we might want to consider actually showing the
change take place, as Rosling did in the quintessential example of communicating data from
We can make use of the Pages shelf in Tableau to bring the Dashboard to life.
First, we'll need to drag the Year Dimension to the Pages shelf on all four of the Sheets on
the Dashboard (the map, the bar chart, the timeline, and the selected year label), and remove
the blue Year pill from the Filters shelves on each Sheet.
Figure 14-1
shows what this change
looks like on the map.
