inspired by your request I implemented a tabluar heat map in Excel, similar to the one in Stephen Few’s article. I did it with Excel 2003, so a small vba-routine is necessary and you would have to enable macros when opening the file.

Unfortunately I do not have a website or blog of my own where I could post it for download. And I don’t want to bother Chandoo again…

So: if you are interested, send me an email to

trm001 (at) online (dot) de

and I will send you the file.

In terms of heatmaps, I was think more of the tabular variety, as described by Perceptual Edge (rules for using color):

http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/visual_business_intelligence/rules_for_using_color.pdf

I find the version without the data the best!

The cone is especially bad: the conic shape of the data points de-emphasizes the higher values. But I consider Excel’s cones, pyramids, and cylinders to be merely the ugly inbred cousins of the 3D bar and column type charts.

I played with the treemapper a bit, but I really have no projects which have a need for that kind of visualization. Personally I don’t that that treemaps are as wonderful a visualization medium as the hype would indicate. And I think the concept is still not understood across the types of clients I have (scientists, enigneers, financiers, all smart people).

They can be useful, sure: I saw a nice example that broke down the contents and directory structure of a hard drive. But it’s based on areas, with both rectangle positions and colors applied semi-arbitrarily.

Jon, ever tried this TreeMapper add-in for Excel? http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/Details/3f3ed95e-26d8-4616-a06c-b609df29756f/Details.aspx

I’ve described a method for doing this here.