Heat Map for Excel
Question: Would you pay $1,295 to be able to create this heat map (below) from an Excel spreadsheet? If so, a company called Lab Escape has a product that will do the trick. Oh yeah, if you want to be able to view [interactively] the output of the standard version software, you need the viewer version that only runs a mere $495.
Taken directly from their site, they claim the benefits of heat maps are:
- Increase Agility – Improve business agility through quicker analysis, better decisions and more effective communication.
- Reduce Risk – Rapidly identify trouble spots, before they are out of control
- Maximize Value – Ensure that attention and resources go where they bring the best return.
- Identify Opportunities – Discover underlying trends that point to high-value opportunities.
[source]
I don’t really mean to pick on this company; it’s just the one that I got an email about today. I think the power of heat maps is actually part of its ineffectiveness, which is too much data. The benefit of a heat map is suggested to be that you can fit a lot of information in a relatively small visualization. If you were to create the same data using a bar chart, it would take up a few pages. The downside of this heat map is there is too much going on with it. The only information I can make out of it are the large outliers. Ironically, the same is probably true if you were to create a visualization using a bar chart. At least you would save $1295 by using a standard bar chart in Excel versus this software.
This heat map shows a ton of data where size and color of the boxes matter. Intuitively, the bigger the box, the larger the number must be, right? But what the heck to the colors stand for? I cannot tell. Also, note the logo images within the boxes – they make the label and value very hard to read.
Do you see value in heat maps? Is this just a bad example that uses too many data points? Please share your thoughts.
June 4th, 2009 at 7:46 am
Tony,
This figure appears similar to SmartMoney’s Map of the Market. Their instructions say that “The rectangle’s size reflects the company’s market cap and the color shows price performance. (Green means the stock price is up; red means it’s down. Dark colors are neutral).” Their map includes a color key. Map of the Market includes all kinds of drill down opportunities and shows at a glance which sectors and/or stocks are increasing and which decreasing. It also shows the big players in each sector. SmartMoney does not include the distracting logos and is less cluttered since you identify rectangles by placing your cursor over them.
See http://www.smartmoney.com/map-of-the-market/ for instructions on interpreting these graphs.
June 4th, 2009 at 8:26 am
1295 $ … ?!?
What is wrong with using something like IBM many eyes (http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/)
It would be interesting to see if someone actually buys this…
I think heatmaps are good for right kind of data (eg. you want show how certain thing is spread across globe in various intensities) but in this example, all I see is some pretty boxes…
June 5th, 2009 at 7:55 am
To be clear, the image included in this post is not from my company Lab Escape. This looks like the heat map from FinViz (http://www.finviz.com/). You can view the Lab Escape heat maps at http://www.labescape.com/info/.
In particular, we do not use logos or shading to disrupt the visualization. We also use a neutral grey for the groups. This makes it clearer to see trends. Also, all our products include a color slider at the bottom that tells you exactly what the colors mean and let’s you adjust them.
Heat maps are actually very good for viewing data sets from 100 – 50,000 rows. When viewing a heat map, you wind up looking for colors that are different from their neighbors that indicate an anomaly (eg: red in a group that is mostly green), colors that are all the same in a group indicating a trend, and the distribution of sizes among and within groups.
In comparison to Map of the Market and other pure tree map visualizations, we provide all the tools to dynamically interact with the map such as re-grouping, filtering, searching, selecting, exporting, printing and importing from external data sources. In comparison to Many Eyes, which does provide better interactivity, we still provide more ways to analyze the data and ensure your data remains private (critical for most of our customers).
I understand the price might seems high, but we are actually very competitive with other visual analytic software programs out there. Price sensitive users can always download the University of Maryland’s Tree Map program. But this lacks many of the features commercial programs like ours have.
In the end, I think you’ll start seeing heat maps in more and more places. The biggest growth of our business has been in providing integrated tree map and other heat map visualizations for use in internal and third-party software.
BTW, no offense taken at picking on us. We’ve been selling heat maps for six years and I’ve learned there are a whole range of price expectations. We generally sell to Fortune 500 and other large to mid-size businesses that are looking not at the price, but at the results (eg: we have one case study showing our heat maps saving a company several million dollars).
June 6th, 2009 at 9:59 am
Naomi – Thanks for clarifying.
Chandoo – Yeah, I’ve used ManyEyes and it’s pretty good. Also, the cost is right for a casual user being that it’s free.
http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/page/Treemap.html
I think it goes beyond just pretty boxes. I see a ton of boxes, many of which I can’t even make out. With the interactive version it would be easier to hover over the box and get more details, but there is just a lot going on. Also, with so many boxes, would you even be looking at the 100 or so that are relatively small? It’s really the big ones that will stand out and catch someone’s attention.
Trevor – Thanks for stopping by and clarifying some good points. For you that are wondering, Trevor is the CEO and founder of Lab Escape.
The email talked about heatmaps, showed an example (the one I posted) and then said there are companies that specialize in the software and used Lab Escape as the example. So it wasn’t very apparent that the example didn’t come from your company.
I think heatmaps/treemaps are good to show outliers when there are a small amount. What happens if you have 1000 data points and there are 200 of the same relative size and trending the same direction? They all show up with the same color and size within a general box. It would be difficult to analyze that scenario without looking at the data. I don’t see much difference between the heatmap and a code that says, give me the top/bottom 10% based on X size and Y percent change. I find it difficult to accurately compare relative size with the visualization.
In regards to the price, I don’t think it’s too much for the right audience. For a casual user or analyst, it wouldn’t make sense. As you said, tor a Fortune 500 company, it’s not a huge investment.
One comment that I need some clarification on is where you said, “We also use a neutral grey for the groups. This makes it clearer to see trends”. If you are displaying data at a point in time with no time series, how does one see a trend? When I think trend, I am visualizing single or multiple data points over time in one visual. Unless I’m mistaken, your product shows many data points as of a point in time. Albeit it could be near real-time, I still don’t see the historical data once the new one is shown. Does that make sense?
Thanks for not being offended – I really didn’t mean to pick on Lab Escape. The comments were more directed at the heatmap/treemap visualization market in general.
Thank you all for the comments!