General

JColorGrid is a platform-independent Java application for transforming numerical or text data into color-grids. A color-grid is a generalization of the popular heat map representation that displays information two-dimensionally with an associated color hue. Color-grid representations provide an excellent means of illustrating complex data sets and can be used to identify trends, clusters and extremes in a given data set.

A generalized color-grid output from JColorGrid is shown below.

 

Color-grids have a high data density, and are easily interpreted making this data representation generally useful to a number of fields. Worked examples of the application of JColorGrid to data representation are provided in the Examples section.

 

JColorGrid Features

JColorGrid has been designed for ease of use and general utility. Data is entered into JColorGrid from a spreadsheet file (.xls) or a tab-delimited text file. Titles, row and colomn headings, scale titles and data are specified in input file. JColorGrid will represent both numerical and text data. There is no limit on the number of columns and rows. The JColorGrid spreadsheet template is shown below.

 

Configuring the output color-grid is done using the JColorGrid configuration menu. Display colors can be specified for the data range, as well as for data the requires special handling, called exceptions. Additionally, the gradiant of the color scale is specified in the configuration menu. JColorGrid has many flexible color options that users are encouraged to explore. JColorGrid will output to both JPEG and EPS allowing the user to further modify the color-grid output in a suitable graphics editor.