When to use a Treemap visual in a PowerBI Dashboard?

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A treemap visual in Power BI is designed to visualize hierarchical data and illustrate the relative sizes of different categories within that hierarchy. It is particularly useful in a Power BI dashboard for the following situations:

1. Showing Hierarchical Data: Treemaps are effective for visualizing hierarchical data, where categories are organized in a tree-like structure with parent and child relationships. For example, you can use a treemap to show sales data by product category, sub-category, and individual products.
2. Comparing Proportions: Treemaps allow users to compare the relative sizes of different categories based on a numeric measure. The size of each rectangle in the treemap represents the proportion of the total measure value for that category. This makes it easy to identify which categories contribute the most to the overall total.
3. Visualizing Part-to-Whole Relationships: Treemaps provide a clear representation of part-to-whole relationships within hierarchical data. Users can quickly see how each category contributes to the total and how the total is distributed across different levels of the hierarchy.
4. Drilling Down into Data: Treemaps support drill-down functionality, allowing users to explore hierarchical data at different levels of detail. Users can click on a category to drill down and see its sub-categories, and continue drilling down further as needed.
5. Identifying Outliers or Anomalies: Treemaps can help identify outliers or anomalies within hierarchical data by visually highlighting categories that have significantly higher or lower values compared to others. This can be useful for identifying areas of focus or further investigation.
6. Showing Distribution: Treemaps are effective for showing the distribution of data across categories. Users can quickly see which categories are the largest and which are the smallest, providing insights into the distribution of resources, sales, or other metrics.
7. Space Optimization: Treemaps efficiently use space to display a large amount of hierarchical data in a compact format. This makes them suitable for dashboards with limited space where you want to convey a lot of information at a glance.