Heat matrix options

You can specify the way that your heat matrix is displayed. A display option might be the color scale, range, whether to display all chart items or only selected items, and whether cell counts are displayed in the heat matrix cells.

Specifying a color scale

By default, the heat matrix colors are displayed from light to dark. You can select an alternative range of colors and reverse the colors by clicking the arrow to the right of the legend. Select Reverse Colors to display the color scale in reverse, from dark to light. Select a different color scale to change the range of colors that are used.

Spacing chart items by using a range

Ranges can be used to space chart items in heat matrices. A range might be linear, logarithmic, or sequential. Ranges apply to count values.

Click the arrow to the right of the legend and select an option to display values according to different ranges:

Range Description
Linear Range

(space values equally)

Map from the range of count values to the range of colors.

For example, a heat matrix contains count values in the range 3 - 22. A linear interval of 4 might be used to generate a series of scale color. These colors represent the ranges 1-4, 5-8, 9-12, 13-16, 17-20, 21-24.

Logarithmic Range

(space smaller values more)

Similar to the linear range. The best linear interval between the minimum and maximum count value is found and mapped to a logarithmic scale.

This range results in a scale where the first item in the range covers many values, and subsequent items cover decreasing numbers of values.

This scale is useful where you have few high count values and you want to emphasize this distribution. For example: 1-50, 51-75, 76-86, 87-93, 94-95.

Sequential

(space colors equally)

The default option.

Sort the cell count values into order and partition into roughly equal-sized groups, one group for each color.

For example, if the ordered unique nonzero count values on the heat matrix are as follows: 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 11, 13, 17, 18, 20, 27, 36, 51, 59, 60, 63, 68, 75, 80, 81, 90, and 99. The unique count value is a total of 22. The range is broken further down into ranges that contain approximately the same number of unique values. In this example, approximately every four numbers are taken resulting in the following scale: 1-7, 11-20, 27-59, 60-75, 80-99. The generated scale is not contiguous.

If your heat matrix is based on numerical values, you can choose to limit the number of rows in the heat matrix to a maximum of 10, 50, or 100. For example, if you open a date and time histogram and then create a heat matrix based on label value, you can choose to limit the number of rows.

Display cell counts in matrices

You can display cell counts in a heat matrix. Cell counts display the number of items on the chart that use the filter. Selected cells in a heat matrix are selected on the chart.

Change whether cell counts in heat matrix cells are displayed by clicking the down arrow to the right of the legend, and selecting Show Cell Counts.

Displaying selected chart items

You can choose whether to display cells in a heat matrix for all chart items or only selected chart items by clicking the required Count option at the bottom of the heat matrix. The Selected Chart items option is only available if Brush Selection onto Bars is turned on in the Options page of the Bars Charts and Histograms pane.

Note: When you click Selected Chart Items, any individual cell selections that exist in the heat matrix are lost.

Selecting ranges of cells

Select a range in the legend by pressing the Shift key and clicking the first range, then clicking the last range. Alternatively, click and drag a rectangle around the cells that you want to select. All cells that correspond to that range are selected on the heat matrix. Corresponding chart items and bars in the histogram are also selected. All other items on the chart are removed from the selection.

You can select a range of cells only when the Count option All Chart Items is selected.