# How to use Animations in Tableau 2020.1

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2020-02-25
- **Format:** Video · 13 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Data visualisation, Tool strategy
- **Tools:** Tableau (animations, filters, formatting, server, table calculations)
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/how-to-use-animations-in-tableau-2020-1
- **Watch:** https://www.youtu.be/fxbARiWgZBY

I walk through the new animated mark transitions added in Tableau 2020.1, demonstrating how they behave across bar charts, line charts and scatter plots. I cover the duration and style settings, sheet-specific defaults, and important caveats about users and server admins being able to disable animations.

## Key takeaways

- Enable animations via the Format tab then Animations, where you can set behaviour across the whole workbook or per worksheet
- Adjust animation duration and choose between simultaneous and sequential styles to control how marks transition and to support narration
- Animations only add value when the selected change is meaningful on screen, otherwise a shifting axis alone is hard for viewers to read
- Recreate Hans Rosling-style motion charts using a date field on the Pages shelf combined with running total calculations
- Don't rely on animations in production dashboards because individual users can disable them in account settings and server admins may switch them off entirely

## Chapters

- 0:25 Default mark behaviour before animations
- 1:11 Enabling animations and duration settings
- 3:01 Simultaneous versus sequential styles
- 4:32 Sheet-specific animation defaults
- 4:59 Animating a line chart meaningfully
- 7:14 Scatter plot and Hans Rosling motion effect
- 10:05 Caveats: users and admins disabling animations
- 11:30 Community resources

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/how-to-use-animations-in-tableau-2020-1

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just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena