DataViz Tip #27: Chart Types: Treemap

Treemaps are a great data visualization tool to represent data items as part of a whole. Items in a treemap are represented as rectangles proportionally to their value and fill up the entire chart area. This lets viewers perceive their relative size much better than with slices in a pie chart and it also lends itself to displaying more data items at once than you can reasonably fit in a pie chart. Especially when combined with interactivity features.

See the Pen amCharts V4: Changing tree map data by amCharts (@amcharts) on CodePen.

Multiple levels of data can be displayed in a treemap at once to show a deeper picture at a glance:

See the Pen amCharts V4: Tree map with two levels visible by amCharts (@amcharts) on CodePen.

Alternatively drill-down functionality can be implemented to declutter the view and help viewers focus on one level at a time:

See the Pen amCharts V4: Drill-down tree map by amCharts (@amcharts) on CodePen.

Try clicking on any of the tiles in the demo above to go a level deeper. Click on “Other” to go multiple levels down.

amCharts 4 introduces amazing Treemap visualization support. Check out the documentation and explore the code for the demos above.

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