We’ve updated a number of the visualizations on the site, in response to user requests. Changes affect the bubble chart, the treemap as well as the stack graph. In this post I will discuss these and give a couple of example uses. Look for more feature additions in the next few weeks (hello, sorting!)

Bubble chart

The old bubble chart looked pretty, but pretty blue. That seemed like an opportunity to show another dimension. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could color each of the bubbles by a categorical attribute? The examples below show a before-and-after: what happens when you color a bubble chart of the US budget to show budget categories.

You can combine coloring and aggregation to create a variety of other views, including some that look like miniature pie charts. These are experimental, and we’re interested in your feedback–and look for a more detailed discussion in a future blog post.

Treemap

The treemap previously required you to upload a numerical column with your hierarchical data. This had two disadvantages: In many cases, you might be simply interested in the number of items in each category. In other cases the treemap’s scaling can create tiny, hard to spot rectangles. The treemap below shows an overview of a backup log, but because the size is proportional to the number of bytes backed up, it contains a large number of tiny rectangles.

If we want to get an overview of the number of jobs run, instead of the number of bytes backed up we can choose ‘no selection’ for the size column, and the treemap will assign equal sizes to each log entry. We also let you color by categories, which makes the overall structure more clear. The image below shows the backup data using constant size and colored by hierarchy level (click for live version).

Stack Graph

You may have seen the reordering widget at the top of the treemap. Now we’ve incorporated that same widget in the stack graph for categories. In the sample below I reused the budget data to show the increases in planned US government spending. Rearrange the widget yourself to see the effect.

We encourage you to try out some of these improvements and see for yourself, so, stop reading this blog post and go play with some data!