Analyzing Data in a Heat Map Visualization

A Heat Map visualization is a combination of colored rectangles, each representing an attribute element. A Heat Map visualization allows you to quickly grasp the state and impact of a large number of variables at one time. Heat Maps are often used in the financial services industry to review the status of a portfolio.

The rectangles contain a wide variety and many shadings of colors, which emphasize the weight of the various components. In a Heat Map visualization:

The size of each rectangle represents its relative weight.
The color of each rectangle represents its relative value. For example, in the image below, larger values are green and smaller values are red.
The large areas, such as the Mid-Atlantic area of rectangles in the image below, represent different groups of data.
The small rectangles, such as New York in the image below, represent individual attribute elements.

If you choose to filter or drill on a visualization, filter conditions are automatically added to the visualization's local filter to customize your view. Because each visualization has its own separate local filter, these filter conditions are only used to filter the display of data in the selected visualization, and do not affect any other visualizations in the quick dashboard. You can remove these filter conditions to undo your changes. Steps are below to drill on data, filter data, or undo your filtering or drilling changes.

Prerequisites

You must have the Edit Dashboard and Run Dashboard privileges.
The procedures below assume that the visualization in which you want to analyze data has already been created.

To drill or filter data in a Heat Map visualization

Click the name of the quick dashboard to run it.
Select one or more rectangles in the visualization by doing one of the following:
- To select individual rectangles, hover the cursor over a rectangle in the visualization. You can select multiple rectangles in the visualization by pressing CTRL, then clicking additional rectangles to select them. Click the arrow icon at the top of the selected rectangles.
- To select all the rectangles in a lasso shape, click and drag over an area of the visualization to choose all the rectangles in the area. Click the arrow icon at the top of the selected rectangles.
From the context menu, select one of the following:
- To drill to an object, select the attribute you want to drill to. For example, to drill to the data at the Category level, select Drill to Category. Only the rectangles you selected are displayed, and the attribute you selected is used to group rectangles in the visualization.
- To display only the rectangles you have selected and remove all other rectangles from the visualization, select Keep Only.
- To display all rectangles in the visualization except the rectangles you have selected, select Exclude.

To undo filtering or drilling on data

Hover the cursor over the visualization in which you want to undo filtering or drilling, then click the arrow icon in the top right. A list of options is displayed.
Point to Edit Filter, then do one of the following:
- To remove all filter conditions from the visualization at once, select Clear All. All filter conditions in the local filter are removed, and are no longer used to filter data in the visualization.
- To remove filter conditions one at a time, hover the cursor over each filter condition you want to remove, then click the x icon next to each condition. The filter conditions you delete are no longer used to filter data in the visualization.