New color slider

Our treemaps use color scales to portray numbers–which can be a tricky business. The treemaps make their best guess at the right scale, but sometimes it’s helpful set the color range by hand. Outlying values might “wash out” the rest of the scale, for instance, or for consistency you may want to set several visualizations to use the same color map.

Our color slider lets you make manual adjustments. The colored bar shows the current color map overlaid on the distribution of data values. The numbers indicate the extreme ends of the scale. (If there are values beyond these ends, they are “capped” at the extremes and a ‘+’ or ‘<' will appear next to the values.)
Interaction

Adjust the scale by clicking and dragging the brackets, or simply type directly in the labels next to the scale. Custom values are maintained when the user changes the dimension that is mapped to the color. To restore the initial color map, right-click the color scale.

Sorting

With few exceptions, Many Eyes visualizations have been faithfully showing information in the order it is found in the data set. For example, if a data set about GDP is alphabetically ordered by country name, then the bar for Afghanistan will appear at the beginning, the bar for Zimbabwe at the end. However, as Stephen Few has noted before, sometimes it’s useful to sort items by numerical value (e.g., sorting the bars from lowest-GDP country to highest).For this reason, we’ve added a “sorting widget” to the bar, line, and stack graphs so you can re-order by:

- Labels: alphabetical order (ascending or descending)
- Values: numerical order (ascending or descending)
- Data Order: follows the order of rows in the data set (same order or reversed)

The third sorting option - data order - is often helpful for time series. If your data set has columns that go “backwards” in time (recent to old), toggling the “data order” button will cause your visualization to show time going forward.We hope you enjoy the new features!