Treemap 4.1 Documentation

Color Setting and Binning for Numerical Attributes

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Overview

• The color setting widget serves as a color legend, a histogram showing the distribution of values, and a data entry widget to set ranges (i.e. bins) of values and assign them different colors.



• The minimum and maximum value on the axis is determined by the minimum and maximum value of the data visible on the Treemap (i.e.if data has been filtered out, then the widget is "zoomed" on the current values.



• "Lock the number of bins" is useful to avoid adding more bins by mistake while pointing at the color legend. It is enabled only when the User Defined Bins option is selected.

Binning options

Equally Spaced Bins - Equally Dense Bins

• The placement of the bin separators is calculated automatically, but you can set the number of bins. Either use the up/down arrows or type the number yourself. The number of bins has to be between 1 and 20.



• You can change the color of bins but not the min and max values.

User Defined Bins

• LEFT-CLICK where you want a NEW bin separator to be added
  RIGHT-CLICK on a separator blue arrow to DELETE a separator
  CLICK and DRAG on the blue arrow to MOVE a bin separator (or you can edit min and max values by clicking on their value box)
  

• Once you lock the number of bins, you will not be able to add any bins (but it is possible to delete the bins).


• This is the default option when the data has both negative and positive values, and is set to have zero as the two bin separation value

To select different colors

• When you click on the "MIN" or "MAX" button, a color picker will appear for you to select colors. When bins are small and hard to highlight with the cursor, you can cycle through the bins by clicking on the "Previous" and "Next" buttons.
• We tried to provide some useful DEFAULT colors but realized there were so many different special cases, so we "gave up"... for now. So the default colors go from green to yellow to red and then just give "useful" defaults that you have to set yourself.

To change the min and max values

Click on the buttons below the min and max buttons showing the VALUES themselves, or click on the values in the legend/histogram.

TIPS for setting your colors

• It is not always easy... we could have spend many more days creating the perfect color widget but we had to stop somewhere. This widget will allow you to do pretty much anything you want with a bit of patience.

• Don't forget to save the settings once in a while so that you can recover from mistakes.

• To see the widget in more detail, you can make the treemap smaller and the control panel larger by dragging the window separator to the left. This will give more width to the color widget, thus, making it more readable and selectable.

• When the bins you need are very close together (often the case for very skewed data):

  • First decide on the number of bins you will need.
  
  
  • Create Equally Spaced Bins.
  
  
  • Choose your colors by selecting colors for each bin range.
  
  
  • Switch to User Defined Bins.
  
  
  • Edit the numerical values of min and max (by clicking on the values below min and max or in the legend/histogram itself).

• In last resort, if you need to see the legend in more details, you can "zoom" on the legend by using the filters to filter the data itself. Once you have clicked on "Hide Filtered", the legend will be zoomed to show only the remaining useful range.

Questions

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