The simplest way to create and customize heat maps
Connect or type in your data, follow the prompts and you're done! Displayr’s heat map generator allows you to customize the appearance of your heat map, so you can create beautiful heat maps in any colour and customize the formatting and appearance of your labels with different fonts and sizes.
Insightful, interactive, and flexible heat maps
Zoom in and out of your heatmap to spot and explore patterns in the data. Use hover labels to keep your heat map decluttered and use drop downs or filters to add another dimension to your heat map. Add annotations around your heat maps to highlight the most exciting results: drag and drop to overlay text boxes, arrows, shapes, and background images.
Easily publish, embed, or export heat maps to PowerPoint
With one click, publish your heat map and impress your colleagues with interactive dashboards that use filter drop-downs, or export them to PowerPoint and PDF. To update your heat maps instantly, you only need to switch your data.
Don't just stop at heat maps; Displayr is the complete tool for all your analysis, data visualization, and reporting.
Create your heat map in 3 easy steps
Step 1
Sign up to Displayr for free to create your heat map.
Step 2
Follow the prompts to connect, type, or paste in your data and create your heat map. Here you can easily customize fonts, colors, backgrounds and sizes or do deeper analysis.
Step 3
Publish your heat map as an interactive dashboard, export to PowerPoint or as a PDF with one click.
What is a heat map?
When it comes to large amounts of data, often a picture really is worth a thousand words. A heat map (or heatmap) is a graphical representation of data where the individual values shown in a matrix are color coded on a graded color scale.
These colors are shaded in proportion to the numbers in the cell, making it a lot easier for our brains to read than a large table. Usually there are two colors, one on either end of the scale and each intervening value on the scale is on a gradient from one-point color to the other.
Most often than not these colors use a warm to cool color spectrum (red-orange-yellow), reminiscent of the colors used by meteorologists to represent temperature – hence the name “heat map”.
The actual "heat map" term was trademarked by Cormac Kinney, a software designer in 1991 to describe a two-dimensional display that portrayed financial market information.
Unlike large tables and datasets which are often too big to show on a single page, a heat map is a relatively compact data visualization. It also allows the viewer to instantly pick out patterns or outliers in the data set.
The appeal of heat maps is that they make complex information easily digestible – they’re self-explanatory and intuitive to understand. Due to the variation in color by either hue or intensity, users are provided with obvious visual cues to help them interpret the data.
As a result, a heatmap can be a powerful and visual tool for data storytelling.
It’s pretty easy to create an impressive heat map with your data using Displayr. Our heat map creator has several inbuilt color palettes to choose from, making it super easy to generate a beautiful visualization. You can also customize the formatting and appearance of your labels with different fonts and sizes.
“Displayr is extremely powerful and extremely intuitive. It can do vastly more analysis more efficiently than any of the tools I’ve tried in the past."
Ron Gailey
President – Americas, Mobile Digital Insights
Don't limit yourself to just heat map
Ready to create more stunning visualizations? There is a whole world out there of awesome ways to visualize your data.
Whether it’s bar graphs, radar charts or pie charts, Displayr can help you transform your data into whatever story you want to tell!
And just like with heat maps, you can customize colors, sizes and fonts and have a play with Displayr’s cool features.
Even better, combine different visualizations to create a truly impressive infographic or presentation. What are you waiting for?
Visualize your data in minutes
Instantly visualize what you are learning. Displayr is a robust, collaborative analysis and reporting tool built for humans, not robots. SQL, R, and no-code work together so you can analyze, visualize, and build your report simultaneously in the same app.
Heat map FAQs
What does a heat map tell you?
A heat map (or heatmap) is a data visualization technique that uses color in two dimensions to convey the magnitude of a phenomenon. Users are provided with obvious visual cues about how the phenomenon is clustered or varies over space, by examining variations in the color’s intensity or hues. As a result, this makes it fairly straight forward to spot trends and issues at a glance due to their color-coded nature.
When should you use a heat map?
Heat maps have been very useful due to their ability to both simplify and visualize data analysis. Common scenarios for using a heat map include business analysis, website user behavioral analysis (for example, analyzing where website visitors are clicking or hovering with their mouse), exploratory data analysis, geographic visualization, and more.
How do you analyze or interpret a heat map?
Due to their color-coded nature, heat maps are easy to interpret and understand. For example, for website user behavior-related heatmaps, red is often used to depict where visitors are engaging the most on a web page, and cooler colors like blue, are used to portray where visitors are interacting the least. The general rule is that the darker the hue, the more significant a particular metric represents.
What are the two main types of heat maps?
A spatial heat map portrays the magnitude of a spatial phenomena as color, often cast over a map. For example, they can be used to showcase varying temperatures in different parts of the world, with a color scheme that ranges from blue (cold) to red (hot).
A grid heat map shows values for two variables of a category across a two-dimensional matrix of colored squares. The color scale (with the intensity of the hue) of the grid is used to highlight significant values. Grid heat maps can be further split into two different types: correlograms and clustered heat maps.
What is the difference between a heat map and a choropleth map?
Choropleth maps and heat maps are sometimes used in place of one another incorrectly for visualizing data on a geographic scale. Both visualizations depict the proportion of a variable of interest, but they differ in how the boundaries for the variable’s data aggregations are built.
Choropleth maps convey data grouped by geographic boundaries, such as countries, states, provinces, and territories. You can also visualize data over a geographic region within a heat map. However, heat maps will illustrate the proportion of a variable over an arbitrary (but usually smaller) grid, that is independent of geographic boundaries.
How can I generate a heat map for free with Displayr?
It’s simple to use Displayr’s heat map maker for free. All you need to do is sign up here, confirm your email by clicking on the confirmation link that you’ll receive, and then follow the prompts to create your first heat map.
How do I create a heatmap in Displayr?
• Click Visualization
• Select Heatmaps
• Choose Heatmap
• Click Add Data or Drag across your variable from Data Sets
• Click OK
• Customize your heat map using the options in the right hand menu
