In BusinessObjects Dashboards (formerly known as Xcelsius), a tree map displays a rectangle, which is tiled with smaller rectangles. The size of each rectangle is proportional to a measure of the data. Also, each rectangle is filled with a color, the intensity of which is related to another measure.

A tree map shows the correlation of two measures. It is an intuitive chart because differences in color and size are easy to distinguish visually.

Figure 1 shows an example of a tree map that compares seven products in two measures: stock price and market share.

The size represents the stock price (the higher the price, the larger the rectangle), and the color intensity represents the market share (the higher the market share, the darker the color). With this chart, you can discover the following facts:

• A company that has a product with a high market share could have a very high stock price (rectangle at the bottom left)
• A company that has a product with a high market share could have a very low stock price (rectangle at the middle right)
• A company that has a product with a low market share could have a very high stock price (rectangle at the top left)
• A company that has a product with a low market share could have a very low stock price (rectangle at the bottom right)

These observations are extreme, so be careful about what conclusions you draw. Maybe a company with a high market share product and a low stock price is doing worse than before, so people don’t want to keep their stock. And perhaps the company with a low market share product and high stock price has an amazing new product that hasn’t taken the market yet, so people have high expectations for the organization.

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