VizWiz

Launch, grow, and unlock your career in data

May 15, 2012

Tableau Tip: Create a beautiful heat map in under 30 seconds

2 comments

This tip is a follow up to my post about asking How common is your birthday?.  In this post, I created a heat map and Matt Stiles asked me if I could write a tutorial showing how I did it so quickly in Tableau.

The steps are for creating the viz only.  I’m assuming you already connected to the data.

Step 1 – Hold the CTRL key and click the Day, Month and Rank fields (they should all be highlighted after you choose them)

image

Step 2 – Open the Show Me window on the toolbar and click on the Highlight Table option

image

You should see the view below with Days in the columns and Months in the rows.

image

Step 3 – Click on the swap icon to place Day on the row shelf and the Month on the column shelf

image

Step 4 – Right click on the Month column label and choose Hide Field Labels for Columns

image

Step 5 – Drag the Rank measure off of the Label shelf

image

You should now this view.

image

Step 6 – Double click the color shelf to show the Edit Colors window.  Choose Orange from the Pallet list and the Reversed option, then click OK.

image

You need to choose the reverse option if you want the highest ranking days to be the darkest.  You final view should look like this.

image

That’s it!  Six steps, less than 30 seconds, and you have a beautiful heat map. 

Give it a shot.

  • Get the data here
  • See my final viz (including interactivity) here

2 comments :

  1. How these heat maps are created ? Is there any specialized tool or software available for monitoring the performance of a website ? Thanks for this useful information about heat maps.

    ReplyDelete