Beauty of Motion Chart in Tableau
Updated: Apr 3, 2025
What is a Tableau?
Tableau is like a story telling tool for our data. It takes raw data from various sources like excel or csv and turns into beautiful graphs, maps or diagrams which are easy to understand. Tableau makes numbers look more meaningful so we can spot patterns and make business decisions.
We have many ways to represent the data in Tableau. For example,
Bar Chart - Generally used to compare - like sales of different products.
Line Chart - Used to see trends over time - like if sales are increasing or decreasing.
Maps - Visualize data geographically - like how sales of a product in different countries.
Motion Chart - It shows data over time using moving bubbles or points like watching trends in animation.
Motion Chart in Detail
What is? A motion chart is like a moving story of our data where bubbles or points shift, grow or shrink over time to show how data changes.
Key Elements: Each data element is represented as a bubble, point or a square. The x-axis and y-axis show 2 different metrics for example - sales vs profit.
How it Works? When you press play button, the chart animates, showing how the data points step by step over time - week by week, year by year how we would like to watch the trend.
Uses and Benefits: Motion charts are great for exploring trends, figuring relationships and observing patterns overtime. For example, we can see if sales are increasing are the profits increasing or vice versa.
Step by Step Implementation in Tableau
In my example, my data source is a hospital data which has different fields like Admission Date, Discharge Date, Length of the Stay etc.
Suppose I want my motion chart to show average length of the stay per week based on discharge date.
Step 1:
Drag and drop Discharge Date into Columns and change from year to week number in the dropdown.
Step 2:
Drag and drop length of the stay and change the measure to average.
Step 3:
Drag and drop discharge date into Pages and change it to week number.
As soon as we drag and drop discharge date into pages we can see a legend appearing on the right side of the screen.
Step 4:
Under Marks Section select the graph to be circle
Step 5 :
On the legend click on show history, select All under Marks to show history for tab and Both under show tab.
Step 6:
Motion Chart for Sales vs Profit:
To demonstrate this chart, we are using Superstore Dataset from Kaggle
Step 1:
Drag and drop Order Date into Columns and change into Month from Dropdown.
Step 2:
Drag and Drop Sales and Profit into Rows and change the Measure to Average for both.
Step 3:
Drag and drop Order date into Pages and change into Month.
Step 4:
Under Marks Section for Profit change the chart type to circle and for Sales change it to Square or circle.
Step 5:
Now click on Sales in Rows and choose dual axis - merging of 2 different charts and also synchronize the axis so we can have the same scale of measure.
Step 6:
Now click on show history in the legend on the right side and select All and both as shown in the below screen shot.
Step 7:
Drag and drop order date into labels for sales and profits and change to month.
Now hit play and see how beautifully we can see how sales and profit are related in each month.
Hope you gained insight for motion chart and its uses.
Motion Chart Source:
Dataset Sources:
Hospital Dataset - HCDataSet
Super Store Dataset - SuperStore
