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Animating a time series and leaving a trail of data points behind.
Hi,
Over on the Flowing Data forum, there is a post with a visualisation of the changing US oil prices.
It's good, but as I pointed out in the comments, you can't see all the data in one view. So, a time series graph makes better sense.
If one wanted to add some animation flair to the chart, I was playing with using Date on the Page shelf to draw the lines over time. However, if you add Date to the Page shelf and animate, it only displays one Date point at a time. What would be nice would be to draw the trend line, i.e. as the Date field on the Page shelf changes, all data points already drawn remain on the view.
Does anyone know a way of doing this?
I've attached the TWBX file with the unanimated chart.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| oil prices.twbx | 113.24 KB |
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Comments
Yes, I would like to see this functionality as well. I have asked for it before.
Hi Andy,
I read that post this morning actually, and your graph is identical to the first sheet in my workbook. :-)
I'm still not sure what kind of "trails" would be useful. A fading of marks based purely upon time would be effective only insomuch as the marks are significantly exclusive spatially. This bar chart animation is a particularly good example, in my mind, of where adding more and more drawn marks to the screen over time would just serve to obscure and muddle the comprehension. Nathan's animation looks very similar to a Tableau animation with time on the page shelf. There's no memory effect in his visualization.
Perhaps I'm going in the wrong direction, and you're talking about smoothing the transition between points as Tableau redraws? That would be cool.
James