Introduction
Treemap Visualization: A Powerful Tool for Hierarchical Data
Treemaps are a versatile visualization technique that excels at displaying hierarchical data in a compact and informative manner. By representing data as nested rectangles, treemaps provide a clear visual overview of the relative sizes and relationships between different categories within a hierarchy.
Key Use Cases
Hierarchical Data Exploration:
Financial Analysis: Visualize the breakdown of revenue or expenses across different departments, product categories, or geographic regions.
Sales Performance: Analyze sales data by region, product line, or sales representative to identify top performers and areas for improvement.
Market Share Analysis: Compare market shares of different companies or brands within various industries.
Resource Allocation:
Budgeting: Visualize how resources are allocated across different projects or departments.
Project Management: Track the progress and resource utilization of various project tasks.
File System Visualization:
Disk Usage: Understand how different files and directories consume disk space.
Codebase Analysis: Analyze the size and complexity of different code modules or packages.
Geographic Data:
Population Density: Visualize population density across different regions or countries.
Economic Indicators: Compare economic indicators like GDP or GDP per capita for different countries or regions.
Benefits of Treemaps
Compact Visualization: Treemaps efficiently display large amounts of hierarchical data in a limited space.
Clear Hierarchy: The nested structure of rectangles clearly represents the hierarchical relationships between different categories.
Quick Insights: Users can quickly identify the relative sizes and proportions of different categories.
Interactive Exploration: Treemaps can be interactive, allowing users to drill down into specific categories for more detailed analysis.
By understanding the key use cases and benefits of treemaps, you can effectively leverage this visualization technique to gain valuable insights from your hierarchical data.
Creating a Treemap Visualization
Select Data for Treemap
Treemap visualization can contain any number of dimensions from one to ten
and one measure.
Other settings in the data tab include:
Show top N dimension value- define how many of the dimension values appear in the chart and if the other values will be grouped into Other values.
The result of these settings will show the top three occupations in each country and all other occupations in the Other group.
Styling a Treemap Visualization
Layout-
Set the display of the cells and padding of the cells (see image above for the result)
Order sets the order of the blocks by size or in a random order.
Labels-
Set the display of labels both for the leaves (the last level in the hierarchy)
And the headers (all other levels)Display- set what is displayed in the label- the dimension value, the measure value, or both.
Font size strategy- static font size is the same in all cells. Dynamic font size changes according to the cell size
Font size- if the font size is static, set the font size
Max levels- set the number of levels that display the header label
Color & Legend
Define the method of coloring the cells, the branch color, and the display of the legend.
The image below shows a treemap with the above settings
