The intent was to compare returns activity (measured by volume of dollars claimed and number of returns) for their customer base where % of returns is encoded by the size of the rectangles while % of dollars is encoded by color - both in differences in hue and intensity. a real-world makeoverīack to our client: their treemap looked similar to the one below (I’ve anonymized the data to protect confidentiality). Andy Kriebel provides a great litmus test for the effectiveness of a treemap in this this post: if it takes longer than 2 seconds to compare categories, go with a simpler design. We should never make our audience do more work than necessary to understand a graph!īottom line: treemaps do have a use case - however consider reaching for something else when your audience needs to be able to make specific comparisons. If our data is such that our audience needs to make precise comparisons between categories, it’s even more cumbersome when the categories aren’t aligned to a common baseline. The limitation is that when we’re encoding data with area and intensity of color, our eyes aren’t great a detecting relatively minor differences in either of these dimensions. While treemaps may seem like a sexy choice for visualizing data, they’re often used when another chart type would serve the data better. Steve Wexler provides a nice example of why a treemap was more effective than a bar chart when visualizing the Electoral College votes from the 2012 election in this post. Precise comparisons between categories is not important. You want to visualize a part-to-whole relationship amongst a large number of categories. Treemaps can work well if your data falls into this scenario: For further reading on treemaps, check out these posts from Jeffrey Shaffer and Robert Kosara. Today, they’re often used generally for categorical data. Color is used to encode a second dimension. The treemap was originally designed to visualize a very large amount of data in a hierarchical, tree-structured diagram where the size of the rectangles organized from largest to smallest. Treemaps are increasingly being included in most data visualization tools (including the latest Excel 2016 version, grouped under “Hierarchy charts”).
Treemap chart excel plus#
Today’s post illustrates some pros and cons of using treemaps, plus possible alternatives. In a recent custom workshop, we encountered an organization using treemaps in many of their visuals and questioned how effective they are.
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