An update to Open Trade Statistics to showcase Tabler and D3po

Showcasing D3po groups and subgroups for data visualization
Author

Mauricio “Pachá” Vargas S.

Published

October 28, 2025

If this post is useful to you I kindly ask a minimal donation on Buy Me a Coffee. It shall be used to continue my Open Source efforts.

You can send me questions for the blog using this form and subscribe to receive an email when there is a new post.

I updated Open Trade Statistics to showcase the new Tabler for R and D3po packages.

Recently, I updated Open Trade Statistics to include 2023 data derived from UN Comtrade.

While the data update was straightforward, I took the opportunity to revamp the dashboard using Tabler for R to enhance the user interface and D3po for interactive visualizations. One of the things I worked on, because I maintain both packages, was to ensure that building treemaps with D3po was as simple as possible.

Here is a screenshot of the updated dashboard:

Country profile: United Kingdom

Product profile: Machinery and mechanical appliances

While Highcharts requires a sophisticated code to render nested treemaps as an end user, D3po makes it easy with the po_treemap() function and moves the complexity to the package internals.

Here is an example of how to create a nested treemap with D3po (clicable):

library(d3po)
Loading required package: htmlwidgets
Loading required package: magrittr
set.seed(123)

d <- data.frame(
  category = c(rep("Apples", 5), rep("Bananas", 4)),
  subcategory = c(
    "Fuji", "Gala", "Honeycrisp", "Granny Smith", "Other",
    "Cavendish", "Lady Finger", "Red Banana", "Other"
  ),
  stock = rpois(9, 100),
  color = c(
    "#e44b5e", "#f26863", "#f98a5c", "#fbb07b", "#f9c1a2",
    "#feffc6", "#edffb9", "#e1ffaa", "#d5fdb8"
  )
)

d3po(d, width = 800, height = 600) %>%
    po_treemap(
        daes(size = stock, group = category, subgroup = subcategory, color = color, tiling = "squarify")
    )

Here are the downloaded SVG images from the treemap above (e.g., for R-Bloggers):

Fruits

Apples

Bananas

I hope it’s useful!