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”). 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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