How can I set the colors for a Histogram chart?

Jonathan Allen shared this question 7 years ago
Answered

I have found that when I create a Histogram chart, the colors default to blue with varying opacity. The problem is that this often leads to unusable charts with invisible or nearly invisible data. See the attached screenshot where I put an arrow pointing to a nearly transparent bar in the histogram. This seems to be the default behavior on both the latest 7.3 build and the 7.3+ beta build.


How can I change this default color behavior so that Histograms can be used? I don't see any color series options in this chart type.

Replies (9)

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Hi Jonathan,


I hope all is well,


Unfortunately a histogram will display best when using a colour category that has a small amount of distinct values, preferable between 2-4. So far we don't have any options to alter the colour options for this although going forward we can raise this as an "Idea" if that helps? I Look forward to your reply.


Regards,

Mark

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As far as I'm concerned, Histograms with color groupings are unusable at this time. Even with a small number of groupings it will set the last group to nearly transparent. I'm assuming the decision to use opacity levels was based on the decision to group histograms by overlaying them rather than stacking them. I'm not sure how this is any clearer than rendering the histogram in a similar way to a stacked vertical column chart. That would also open up color options so it wouldn't have to be based on opacity. Perhaps have two histogram options, stacked and overlaid?


In either case, yes please raise an "Idea" around making Histograms more readable when using color groupings. Thank you.

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Hi Jonathan,


Thank you for getting back to me, I have since placed this within our "Idea" section, hopefully going forwards we can get enough votes so that we can have this implemented in one of our future builds. We can see this "Idea" with this link: http://community.yellowfin.bi/topic/histogram-chart-colour-options


I hope this helps.


Regards,

Mark

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Great, thanks Mark!


-Jon

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Hi Jonathan,


No worries, I will update you when I get news.


Regards,

Mark

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Hi Jonathan,


I hope all is well,


I have since looked into this using our latest build of 7.3+ 20170608 and I added the same 2 categories that you added from our SKI Team data. My results are as follows:


5338259b9712a4a5281c40a92a96cb96


We can see the colour differences with the different Camp Rating, although I suspect you are looking to have these colours more defined so that they are less of the opacity, correct?

I look forward to your reply.


Regards,

Mark

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Hi Jonathan,


I just want to touch base and question whether or not you had chance to go through my reply. If you can get back to me asap I would appreciate this greatly.


I look forward to your reply.

Regards,

Mark

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Hi Mark,

Sorry I was out of the office last week. In the screenshot you posted you can see in the legend that some of the categories are completely transparent. Furthermore, the categories are represented by varying levels of opacity, so it's impossible to distinguish between layered lower levels of opacity and a single higher opacity area. It seems that this was designed to be a layered graph, but the way this was implemented is unusable. Data is invisible in some cases and indistinguishable in others. It seems like Histograms would work better if they were implemented as stacked vertical column charts instead.


Best regards,

Jon

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Hi Jonathan,


Thank you for clearing this up that little bit more, I will keep this Idea up for voting till we can get clarification that we can go ahead and put this forward to the Devs to be considered within one of our future builds.


It is clear that we are looking to have these colours more defined, as looking at the Metacarpus - Scapula shows how very similar they are to being the same colour.


NOTE: I have updated the "Idea"


Regards,

Mark

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Hi Johnathan,

I just wanted to reach out on this and add a couple options:

Color by reference code - if the field you are intending to color by has a reference code associated with it, you can use these colors.

Change monochrome color - while it may not be easy to see the light values still, you can change the color that is used (so not just the light blue)

Please let me know if either of these will work for you.

Regards,

Nathan

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Hi Nathan,

I'm not sure if you were following the conversation on this post: https://community.yellowfinbi.com/topic/histogram-chart-colour-options


Whether using a different color or using reference codes, the problem is the same. The histogram functionality when doing a group by color uses varying opacity to overlay the data. Even if reference codes are used, once you get to 4 or 5 categories the data becomes fully transparent.

Furthermore, this approach of overlaying the data on top of itself is a confusing approach to drawing a histogram. Depending on the order it can become impossible to identify which data you are looking at.

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