How to Use Pages in Tableau

Animating your data visualizations can transform a static report into a compelling story that grabs your audience's attention. Instead of showing a big, complex chart, you can reveal insights progressively, making trends and patterns easier to understand. This is exactly what Tableau's Pages Shelf is designed for. This article will show you step-by-step how to use the Pages feature to bring your data to life.

What Exactly is the Tableau Pages Shelf?

Think of the Tableau Pages Shelf as a way to create a flipbook for your data. It takes a single view and breaks it down into a sequence of separate "pages," with each page representing a different value of a dimension you choose. When you "play" these pages in sequence, you get a simple but powerful animation.

For example, if you place a time dimension like "Month" on the Pages shelf, each page in the sequence will represent a different month. As you cycle through the pages, your chart will automatically update to show the data for January, then February, then March, and so on, creating an animated timeline that showcases how your metrics have changed.

The Pages shelf is located directly above the Filters shelf in your Tableau worksheet. It's a simple drag-and-drop feature, but it unlocks a surprisingly effective way to engage with your data dynamically.

When Should You Use Pages in Tableau?

The Pages feature is more than just a novelty, it serves specific analytical and storytelling purposes. It's an excellent choice when you want to isolate changes frame-by-frame rather than displaying all data points at once. Here are a few ideal scenarios for using it:

• Animating Trends Over Time: This is the most common and powerful use case. Visualizing yearly sales growth, weekly website traffic fluctuations, or daily stock price movements helps stakeholders see the story unfold chronologically. It’s far more impactful than a static line chart that shows everything at once.
• Comparing Members of a Dimension Sequentially: While you can use filters to look at different categories, Pages animates the transition. Imagine you want to compare the performance of different regional sales teams. Placing "Region" on the Pages shelf lets you cycle through each region's performance one at a time, making it easier to focus on each one individually before moving to the next.
• Presenting Data Stories: During a presentation, instead of overwhelming your audience with a dense scatter plot showing every data point for every year, you can use Pages to add data year-by-year. This allows you to narrate the changes and guide their attention to the specific patterns emerging in each period.
• Analyzing Geospatial Patterns: When working with maps, animating data over time can reveal fascinating trends, like the spread of sales across a country, the movement of a shipping fleet hour by hour, or the changing hotspots of customer activity month over month.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Using the Pages Shelf

Let's walk through a practical example to see the Pages feature in action. Imagine you want to create an animation showing your total monthly sales evolving throughout a year.

Step 1: Build Your Base Visualization

First, you need a basic chart to animate. Your visualization should include the measures and dimensions you want to see change on each "page." For our example, we'll create a simple horizontal bar chart showing sales by product category.

1. Open a new worksheet with your data source (e.g., the sample Superstore dataset).
2. Drag the Sales measure to the Columns shelf.
3. Drag the Category dimension to the Rows shelf.
4. Drag Category again to the Color tile on the Marks card to give each category a distinct color.

You should now have a simple bar chart showing total sales for the three product categories: Furniture, Office Supplies, and Technology.

Step 2: Add a Dimension to the Pages Shelf

Now, we'll add the "flipper" for our data flipbook. We want to see how these category sales change for each month, so our time dimension is the key.

1. Find the Order Date dimension in your Data pane.
2. Drag Order Date and drop it directly onto the Pages shelf.
3. By default, Tableau might set this to YEAR(Order Date). Right-click the YEAR(Order Date) pill on the Pages shelf and change it to Month (the second option, which gives you a discrete month like "May 2020").

You’ll notice two things happen immediately: your bar chart updates to show data for just the first month in your dataset, and a new control card appears on the right side of your worksheet.

Step 3: Animate Your Visualization

That new card on the right is your animation controller. It provides all the tools you need to browse through your pages.

• The Slider: The slider lets you manually scrub through the pages (in this case, the months). Dragging it will update the bar chart in real-time.
• Forward/Backward Arrows: These buttons let you move one page at a time. This is great for slowly walking through specific moments in your data.
• Play/Pause Button: This is the magic button. Click the forward-facing triangle (▶) to start the animation. You'll see the chart automatically cycle through each month, with the bar lengths updating to reflect the sales performance for that period.

Congratulations! You've just created your first animated visualization in Tableau.

Customizing Your Animation with the Pages Control Card

Creating the animation is just the start. The Pages control card offers several options to refine how your story is told, adding more context and analytical depth.

Adjusting Speed and Looping

Next to the Play/Pause button are three speed settings: Slow, Medium, and Fast. You can change the playback speed to match your narration or to give your audience enough time to absorb what's happening on each frame. To the far right of the slider, you'll see a "Loop playback" button. Activating this will cause your animation to restart automatically once it reaches the end, which is useful for unattended displays.

Showing History for Context

Perhaps the most powerful feature on the control card is the "Show history" checkbox. Displaying historical data adds critical context to your animation. Clicking it reveals a dropdown menu with several options:

• All: This keeps the marks from all previous pages visible on the chart. New pages will show their marks in full color, while previous pages' marks will appear faded in the background. This is useful for seeing the full journey of your data.
• Selected: This works similarly to "All," but you can select specific color legends or marks to highlight their history while others remain hidden.
• Trails: The real star for certain charts. When you select Trails, Tableau connects the marks from successive pages with a line. This is incredibly effective on scatter plots or maps where you want to show the path of a data point over time. Imagine tracking a moving object or the changing relationship between two metrics.

For our bar chart example, "All" is a great choice. When animated, you'll see the current month’s bars in full color, while the previous months' bar positions will remain as faded "ghosts," giving you a clear sense of growth or decline.

Practical Tips for Effective Storytelling with Pages

To move from a simple animation to a powerful data story, keep these best practices in mind:

• Keep the View Uncluttered: Pages work best for visualizations with a manageable number of marks. An overly complex view with hundreds of data points can become a confusing mess when animated.
• Fix Your Axes: By default, Tableau’s axes adjust automatically to fit the data on each page. This can be misleading. A massive sales month could shrink the axis, making a subsequent average month look artificially small. Right-click on your quantitative axis (e.g., Sales) and choose "Edit Axis." From there, set it to "Fixed" and define a manual range that accommodates all your data. This ensures a consistent scale for fair comparison across all pages.
• Choose Your Dimension Wisely: Time is a popular choice for Pages, but don't forget other categorical dimensions. Animating by "Region," "Sales Repr," or "Marketing Campaign" can offer fresh perspectives, as long as there's a certain logic to exploring them sequentially.
• Understand Sharing Limitations: A key detail to remember is that the animated, interactive playback functionality only works within Tableau Desktop and when published to Tableau Cloud or Tableau Server. You can't directly export the animation as a GIF or MP4 file. A common workaround for sharing in presentations is to use a screen recording tool to capture the animation as a video.

Final Thoughts

The Tableau Pages shelf is a fantastic tool for elevating your dashboards from static reports to dynamic narratives. By sequentially stepping through your data based on categories or time, you can guide your audience's focus, reveal hidden trends, and present your findings in a digestible and highly engaging format.

While mastering features like Pages in Tableau is a valuable skill, we know building data literacy across an entire team - and finding the time to build reports - can be a huge challenge. Sometimes you just need answers from your data without the steep learning curve. That's why we created Graphed. We let you connect your marketing and sales data sources and build live business dashboards using simple, conversational language, turning hours of report-building in complex tools into a 30-second conversation.