How and Why to Build Tree Maps in Tableau

By: Oliver Linley

Ollie lives in Cape Town, South Africa, and is passionate about all things data - and all things Tableau! If you have a question, feel free to reach out to him directly via email.

We're looking at Tree Maps this week! If you're trying to show breakdowns of the whole in Tableau, you need to have Tree Maps in your tool kit.

Tree Maps are amazing because:

1. They're particularly good at representing data with long tails. 

2. They can represent data in a hierarchical structure (we can build Tree Maps within Tree Maps)!

3. They're space-efficient, and allow us to visualize many dimensions or measures in one view. 

Tree maps also have a few "gotcha's" to look out for:

1. Too many values can make them overcrowded

2. A large size disparity between the largest and smallest values may mean some labels don't render

3. You have limited control over the sort order of the individual squares

To build a Tree Map, you need to:

1. Change your mark type to square

2. Place a dimension on the detail tab

3. Place a measure on the size tab

And that’s your basic Tree Map!

Ready to see what you can do with tree maps? Check out the video! You can learn how to build standard tree maps, top 10 tree maps, and we even cover some Tableau order of operations and Level of Detail Expressions!

Want to supercharge your Tableau learning? Join us for one of our upcoming Tableau training sessions! You can see our summer lineup here.

Resources

• Download the Tableau Workbook from the Video here!

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