#Sample treemap chart excel plus#

Although Harley-Davidson XG500 sold less no.

Each rectangle showcases two quantitative variables: the average sales for a modelГўВЂВ”represented by the dimensions of the rectangleГўВЂВ”and the percentage growth in the sales of a model compared to the previous yearГўВЂВ”represented by the color of the rectangle.Д«elow are a couple of deductions that you can easily make from the above chart: This lends itself well to comparing across categories and we can easily see that four customers comprise the majority of return activity.The treemap chart above shows the category-wise sales figures for popular motorbike models.

Below, IвЂ™ve displayed all customersвЂ™ returns and dollars claimed horizontally. What if I asked you which are the top 10 customers by dollars claimed? Or whatвЂ™s the exact difference between Customer A and BвЂ™s % of returns? We can see how easily a treemap breaks down when trying to make these comparisons. However, it doesnвЂ™t work so well when communicating whatвЂ™s interesting in this data. IвЂ™d argue that this visual might work well in an exploratory phase of analysis, where the analyst is sorting through the data to find what might be interesting to stakeholders. I can make a few general conclusions from this visual: three customers (A, B, and C) are roughly half of the return activity (visually estimated based on the size of the rectangles) and these same three are also pretty drastically different in terms of dollars claimed (judged by the intensity of color-although without a color legend itвЂ™s difficult to discern much more than that). 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 makeoverД«ack to our client: their treemap looked similar to the one below (IвЂ™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!Д«ottom 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, itвЂ™s even more cumbersome when the categories arenвЂ™t aligned to a common baseline. The limitation is that when weвЂ™re encoding data with area and intensity of color, our eyes arenвЂ™t great a detecting relatively minor differences in either of these dimensions. While treemaps may seem like a sexy choice for visualizing data, theyвЂ™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, theyвЂ™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 вЂњHierarchy chartsвЂќ).

#Sample treemap chart excel plus#

TodayвЂ™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.