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jwalter10's avatar
jwalter10
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5 years ago
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color management advice

Hi, I'm looking for an comprehensive way of controlling the colors that appear on my graphs other than manually selecting each color for a particular value.  Maybe there is a tutorial somewhere?    ...
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TomMartens's avatar
TomMartens
Icon for Super User rankSuper User
5 years ago

Hey jwalter10 ,

 

I wrote the chapter "CHAPTER 8 – Using DAX to solve advanced reporting requirements" that covers exactly your question.

Maybe you want to have a look at the book Phil_Seamark and I have written some time ago:

 

As the solution is not that simple, please excuse that I do not simple copy the chapter (next to some legal considerations):
Pro DAX with Power BI: Business Intelligence with PowerPivot and SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular: Seamark, Philip, Martens, Thomas: 9781484248966: Amazon.com: Books

 

The simple product table:

Regards,

Tom

 

jwalter10's avatar
jwalter10
Icon for Helper I rankHelper I
5 years ago

Hi Tom, 

Thanks for your suggestions.  I did get your book and see how you are able to determine a color based on values within the data, but I am not seeing where to apply it to my visual.  The conditional formmating tab is only visible in select cases, as seen in Parry's example I downloaded.  It appears to be ok if i only select 2 of the three values going into the visual (axis and values), if i select the third, and with any combination, i lose the conditinal formatting ability.  Am I missing something?  almost all of my visuals have a time axis, a legend (products that i want to control colors for) and the values for each product.  Nothing i can see will give me that conditional formatting capacity.  Is this coming in a future version?  mine is currently desktop Version: 2.88.1144.0 32-bit (December 2020) 

also sorry for the messages getting out of sync

conditional formatting tab available and linked to the color fieldworking conditional formatting, but only 2 of 3 data points specifiedadding the 3rd data point breaks the conditional formattingNotice the conditional formatting tab is now missing

  • TomMartens's avatar
    TomMartens
    Icon for Super User rankSuper User
    5 years ago

    Hey jwalter10 ,

     

    unfortunately the ability to apply conditional formatting is dependent of the dimensionality of the data assigned to the visual.

    As soon as the legend is used or has been used, the ability to apply a conditional formatting disappiears.

     

    I have no idea if this will change some in the future.

     

    Regards,

    Tom

    • jwalter10's avatar
      jwalter10
      Icon for Helper I rankHelper I
      5 years ago

      thanks, I appreciate that this is a bonus to be able to do this in this ongoing and developing PowerBI, even though its been a staple of Microsoft Office for years.  Still, it feels kind of worthless of an option if it only works with two dimensions of a visual and not three which would be typical of most visuals, i would think.  Hopefully that is something that can be addressed.

       

      It really comes down to having no control over the data colors except for painstakingly finding each item and assigning a color.  What is really hard is there is no consistency...in the original post, i showed the top three with the same colors (becuase i had copied the original and just had different parameters), but as soon as I put a brand new visual it comes up with an entirely different set of colors.  Another issue is that if the data changes and a new product is included (say because it was a more recent addition), it throws off all the existing colors.

       

       I guess i don't understand what the default behavior is in order to control it better.  Anyone else have this problem?