Many Eyes is a website created by IBM to open up, or "democratize" as they say, visualization for data analysis. All of the data sets and visualizations are open for everyone and anyone can upload data and create visualizations. You can even make your own visualization from someone else's data. Anyway, Many Eyes is great, but I wanted to talk about one of the visualization types available: treemaps.

Each data item, or row in the data set, is represented by a rectangle. The rectangles have different sizes, with the area being proportional to a user-defined attribute. All of the rectangles fit into one giant rectangle (being that all the different sized rectangles equal 100%). It's the same principle as pie charts, but much easier to visualize smaller values.

Why care? Treemaps work best with very complex information. Do you have a budget that includes departments, sub-departments, and multiple categories? Do you have multiple sales people or fundraisers with multiple clients or donors? Finally, do you recognize that it's extremely difficult to convey meaning through spreadsheets? Then it's time for treemaps.

Treemaps allow our brains to quickly grasp very complex information using shape and colour and proportion. On Many Eyes you can see completed visualization comparing the city v. highway mileage of every vehicle, sortable by manufacturer, car line, transmission and class. There's even a visualization of the books of the Bible, by testament, type and size.

I've attached some snapshots of some treemaps I made  with Many Eyes (then edited to look awesome) to help my key stakeholders understand the important data of our operations.

Note, the context of the images is deliberately excluded. However, you can see that red is bad, and blue is good.