Excel Treemapper

The Treemapper is a tool for visualizing hierarchical data with proportionally-sized squares.

It takes in a spreadsheet with hierarchical data. As an example, consider this table showng how different divisions of XYZ Corp are doing at sprocket, widget, and screw sales:

Unfortunately, it's kind of hard to read this. How much overhead is in Sprockets but not in one of the subdivisions? Where are the trouble spots?

Treemapper provides a tool to provide an overview of this information.

This draws regions' size as the number of employees, and the color linked to profit or loss.

Treemapper installs itself as a button with Excel.

Install the application. From Excel, select Tools | Add-Ins, and check Treemapper. Two sample spreadsheets with instructions are included.

Click here to install Treemapper

The Treemap was developed by Ben Shneiderman, at UMD. Here's the official homepage, with their implementation.

Other treemap toolkits include:

· The MSR Visualization Components (which were used to construct this) and an article about how to use this one

· An open-source Java treemap

Also, other treemap uses include:

· Smartmoney.com's Map of the Market

· SequioiaView's hard drive analyzer