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July 8, 2008
Implementing Heatmaps in the Real World
Currently Heatmaps are widely used in science and the financial sector. Heat maps are an excellent way to visualise data, the reader instinctively knows what the information means.
To illustrate this by example, these Heatmaps are used on various financial and stock market Web sites. Nasdaq.com and SmartMoney.com both use heat maps to show stock price and various market sector performance at-a-glance.
Visitors to these sites can mouse over or drill down to get further details about a stock’s current performance.
Currently finding tools to support the effective delivery of heratmaps as part of your business intelligence solution is far from easy.
Outside of specialist tools or alternatively pure graphics packages, the software world is being quite slow to facilitate the widespread adoption of the heatmap as an analytical tool. This is probably best illustrated by the inclusion of just the most basic Heatmap functionality in Microsoft Office 2007, which, while a good start and ahead of the pack in terms of delivering heat maps more widely, will need a few more iterations before this can help provide effective analytics. LogiXML have shown the vision and foresight to embed heatmaps in all of their reporting tools
In a world accustomed to pie charts and 3 dimensional bar charts, which are less effective in the real world than in the product demonstration, this makes a refreshing change.
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Posted by Steve Greaves at July 8, 2008 3:45 AM
