Heatmap is a type of visualization that is used to project the mass of data on a map for any given point. We can say it’s a specialized chart that uses colors to represent data values in a table. We’ll find it most useful when we need to plot large and complex data. Now, let’s look at what PowerBI Heatmap is.

A Power BI Heatmap is a graphical representation of data in which individual values in a matrix are represented as colors. Seeing the colors helps us understand the chart clearly.

A solid example to show the usefulness of HeatMaps is Weather Forecast. I’m very sure at a point we’ve seen news channels where a reporter shows the weather forecast- what the weather will be in the future and sometimes they report on what the weather has been in the past. They always show us areas or regions with different temperatures ranging from low to high with some color contours.

Let’s move on to how we can create a HeatMap. We will demonstrate with an Earthquake data. We will create a PowerBI heatmap for earthquakes occurring in a given period of time.

Step 1

Open your PowerBI Desktop and load the earthquake data in your report. Load the data by clicking on Get Data → select your file type i.e. Excel, text/CSV, Web, SQL Server etc.c. Then click on Load.

We then have our data in our report which we can see on the Field Tab. Now, what we need to do is to check under our visualization if we have the HeatMap amongst the various charts.

Step 2

On checking the Visualization tab, we don’t have the Heatmap present amongst charts. What we need to do is to add to the interface. We can do that by clicking on the three-dot option which brings up a list of options.Then we select Get more visuals.

Step 3

After Selecting Get more visuals, we’ll be asked to sign in to Microsoft account. After that, it opens up a new page where we can find different PowerBi visuals to add to our report. What we need is the Heatmap, so we go to the Search bar and type in HeatMap, then we select the first item on the search return list. After selecting the item, it opens up a new page for the Heatmap then we click on Add. It then automatically adds this to our visualization tab. Ensure you are connected to a network while doing this.

We can see we have the heatmap in our visual. We can now proceed to build our chart.

Step 4

What we will do now is select the different fields we need in our report. Just like what we have below, we add each field respectively.

After then we can see our Earthquake map in our report, just as shown below.

In the above picture, we have more earthquakes in areas colored black and fewer earthquakes in areas with light blue colors.
For us to see more better regions in our map and as well improve the quality of our view, we need to click on the Format option on the visualization panel and then look for Renderer and change the Renderer type to Heat as shown below.

Whenever we do that, we should have the chart below. What this is telling us is that the areas with red color show us regions with more earthquakes and regions with blue color have fewer earthquakes just as we mentioned earlier.

Step 5

Now, we can add more colors to make our map more visible and clearer. Let’s do this in that same Format tab option. Check among list of Options, we should find Heat map under Renderer, click on it and change any of the colors of the levels we find there just as shown below.

Change the Level5 color to Red, so we should have a different chart below.

Here is what our chart looks like. We can also change other level colors in the Heatmap options.

How to Create HeatMap Table

It is also possible to create a HeatMap Table. We can create a heatmap table by clicking on the table visual in the visualization panel. We will add the necessary fields we need, just like the example below.

We will also change the style of our table to Minimal and turn on the background and font color under the Format tab options.

Then we should have our table as seen below

Turn on the Background and font color (Value) here under these options.

Finally, change the font colors to our desired choice. We should have a table heatmap as shown below.

Hope you enjoyed this post. Thanks for reading.