What is a heat map in Tableau?

A heat map encodes a measure's value using color intensity across a grid of two dimensions, letting you spot patterns, hotspots, and outliers at a glance across a large number of categories without reading individual numbers.

Rows:    [Sub-Category]
Columns: [Region]
Marks:   Square, Color = SUM([Sales])

• Two dimensions define the grid's rows and columns (e.g. Sub-Category by Region).
• A measure is dropped onto Color, and a diverging or sequential color palette shows low vs high values.
• Mark type is usually Square or Circle, sized uniformly, so color alone carries the message rather than mark size.

Heat maps scale well to far more categories than a typical bar chart could display legibly — a grid of 20 sub-categories by 10 regions (200 cells) is easy to scan visually for color patterns, while the same data as 200 individual bars would be unreadable.

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