Heat map is a type of map using color to display data. It can be created in Tableau with one or more Dimension and at least one Measure value. Heat map is used to compare data based on colors. For example, a decrease in sales will be red while increase is green. Another version of heatmap is density marks map. In this tutorial, we will focus solely on regular heat map.
Open the US Births data. Click the drop-down arrow on Month and select "Convert to Discrete" and "Convert to Dimension". Do the same thing for Date of month
Move Month to Column and Date of month to Row
On Marks Card, select Square
Move Births to Color
You now have a heat map in less than a minute. Feel free to change the color as needed, I use Blue-Teal here.
Heat map is good for comparing data. We easily see that there are much less babies born in October, November, and December compared to other months.
