Animating Tableau

Including animation in a presentation can be very effective for engaging the audience. Hans Rosling accomplishes this admirably with his popular YouTube video 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes. In this video, Rosling uses data visualization to track wealth and life expectancy over time. His combination of data visualization with insightful commentary and a passion for his message makes Rosling's video a must-see for anyone interested in making appealing presentations using data.

Animation is easy to implement in Tableau but has a curious shortcoming. It is available via Tableau Reader but not Tableau Server. A worksheet with animation that is uploaded to Tableau Server will provide the end user with an option to click through each frame of the animation or access any given frame via a dropdown, but there is no option to play from beginning to end. With HTML5, a play option would probably not be difficult for Tableau developers to implement. So why hasn't this been done...