With the enormous amount of data being generated every day from ubiquitous sources, executive management has become in higher need of visuals that are worth a million words- not only a thousand. Such visuals make the most critical piece of information stand out so that management can recognize reality and, hence, make decisions. For that, deploying such visuals in data visualization is no longer a luxury feature.
Luckily, MS #Excel- 2016 release onwards- provides the ability to build several types of charts that convert ‘raw’ data into visuals that make critical information conspicuous. #Treemaps, #Maps, and #Pareto are powerful charts that you can insert in a few buttons clicks. Although different as visuals, they aim at the same objective of figuring out the vital few elements that contribute the most to the overall. In this post I will touch on Treemaps and Maps while leaving Pareto for another post.
A Treemap is a collection of rectangles representing data points relative to each other. That is, each rectangle is displayed with a size proportional to its contribution from the entire data set. For example, if COVID cases in the USA contributes to 17% of the whole cases, it is represented with a rectangle that takes up around 17% of the size of the entire Treemap. This helps to spot at a glance which few countries suffered the highest COVID cases amongst other countries under study.
If your data is based on geographical locations, then you can leverage Maps in Excel to communicate the same message. With varied color intensity, Excel can automatically highlight geo locations that contribute the most compared to other locations. Maps are simple and straightforward to create, yet they send a myriad of messages.
The movie of this post illustrates how to create both Treemap and Map Charts for the COVID19 Cases data across the World (212 countries) during the year 2021.
NB: Data source: covid.ourworldindata.org
