A tree map is a type of data visualization that displays hierarchical data in the form of rectangles.
This is a tree map.
What it's showing is the divisional sales distribution.
By taking a quick look at this, I can tell
I have three divisions, game, productivity, utility and I have different regions for each division.
The division with the highest sales seems to be the game division because it's taking up the most area
here.
Then productivity then utility.
Also notice that the rectangles here are organized in descending order. The bigger rectangles come first,
the smallest one comes last.
I also notice something is missing from the utility division.
What seems to be missing here? It's the Asia region. Utility doesn't seem to be selling to Asia.
These are the benefits of a tree map.
It gives me a quick idea of how my data is organized. What it doesn't do by default is to show me exact
numbers and allow me to compare each of these categories exactly with one another.
For example, I can see that North America seems to be second place.
It seems to be getting more sales than in Europe but I can't exactly see how much bigger it is.
If I hover over it, I can actually see the value associated with each one.
I could also adjust the data labels to include the values. And I'm going to show that to you in a second.
But if you're interested to presenting to management and they just want to see exact numbers, you might
want to use another type of chart.
If you want to give your audience an idea about the structure of your divisions and regions then a tree
map is a good data visualization tool to use. So let me show you how to set it up from scratch.
First step is to organize your data.
In this case I have division, region, and sales.
Notice that division is grouped together.
What doesn't matter here is the order of the data.
We saw that the game division was the division with the highest sales.
I have it as the second group.
But notice what happens when I actually insert the tree map.
Let's just highlight the area here.
Go to insert, from the charts option.
.
There is an icon here to insert a hierarchy chart.
Click on it, first option is the treemap. That's all you have to do.
Well, actually you just need to give it a title and you're done.
The treemap has done the organizing for you, so it brought in the game division first even though it's
second here.
It brought in Australia first for the game division even though it's second here.
Treemaps are one of these newer charts that were introduced to Excel.
The downside of them is that they don't have the flexibility that the normal charts have.
For example, for the chart title in a normal chart I could go type in the equals sign here and attach
the title to a cell. But I can't do that in these newer charts.
It doesn't let me type in the formula box. I have to type the title in manually.
Let's see what options we have for our series here.
Just click on the series
press Control+1 to bring up the series options. From here
I just see I don't have that much choice.
Default seems to be overlapping.
What happens if I click on none?
The titles here disappear.
So these are my division titles.
If I select none, I have to rely on the legend to tell which division, which area on the chart is. Overlapping
was the standard here and banner is the one I prefer because it puts the title right above the chart
And it splits a little bit so we don't get confused on what is the first category and what is the second
category.
Once we have the banner, we can actually remove the legend.
Just press delete and that's it.
We're done.
The other thing we could do though is to add data labels to this so let's just click on the data labels here.
From the label options.
Let's open this grouping, instead of just showing the category name.
We can also show the value here.
Now is this dynamic?
Let's just do a test. Asia in the productivity division is last here.
What happens if I change this to a much bigger number?
Press enter, Asia shifts to here.
Right.
The organizing of this is done by the chart itself.
I don't have to do anything. Which is a great advantage of using treemaps.
Now what if we wanted to organize this differently?
What if we wanted regions as our heading and divisions as our rectangles?
All we have to do is organize our data differently as well.
So we have to put the regions together basically sort by region and then have the division inside the
region and then have our sales values.
Now again once I have that set up, all I have to do is highlight the area, go to insert, and insert a tree map.
Let's just drag it here and we are all set.
We have our regions on top and the divisions inside.
The other thing you might want to do is to change the default color that Excel gives you.
So here is South America, Asia.
This seem to be a similar color. I can change that by either clicking in the chart to just highlight
that area or clicking on the legend.
For South America, if I just click it on the legend.
I can go to the fill options here and select a different color from my list here.
So let's go with a gray color.
Click two times on the region you want to change the color of, go to solid fill and select the color
of your choice.
We can go with the orange here and just repeat for the different regions. Either select from here
by clicking twice on the legend or by clicking twice on the area in your chart.
I'm just gonna go ahead and set a color for each of these.
Now that I have set the color of my choice for each of these areas.
I can also go and change the series options to banner instead.
Now my banners get the same color as my rectangles.
I can remove the legend and all I have to do is to give this a title.
Let's just do one final testing. What happens if one of the areas becomes bigger than another area?
Does the entire area shift? Let's do a test for South America, that's right here.
Let's increase the number by a lot.
The entire area shifts and everything is sorted automatically.
So that's how you can work with treemaps in Excel.