Changing Colors, Patterns, Dashings, and Transparency

Many different items in a visualization have a fill and border. The most obvious example is a bar in a bar chart. The color of the bars is the fill color. They may also have a solid, black border around them.

There are other less obvious items in the visualization that have fill colors. If the fill color is transparent, you may not know there is a fill. For example, consider the text in an axis label. It appears as if this text is "floating" text, but it actually appears in a frame that has a transparent fill color. You can see the frame by selecting the axis label.

Any frame in the visualization can have a fill and border style, including the frame around the whole visualization. Also, any fill has an associated opacity/transparency level that can be adjusted.

How to Change the Colors, Patterns, Dashing, and Transparency

1. Select the item you want to format. For example, select the bars in a bar chart or a frame containing text. If the visualization is split by a categorical variable or field, you can also select the group that corresponds to an individual category. This allows you to change the default aesthetic assigned to that group. For example, you can change the color of one of the stacking groups in a stacked bar chart.
2. To change the fill color, the border color, or the fill pattern, use the color toolbar.

   Note: This toolbar does not reflect the state of the current selection.

   To change a color or fill, you can click the button to select the displayed option or click the drop-down arrow to choose another option. For colors, notice there is one color that looks like white with a red, diagonal line through it. This is the transparent color. You could use this, for example, to hide the borders on bars in a histogram.

   • The first button controls the fill color. If the color is associated with a continuous or ordinal field, this button changes the fill color for the color associated with the highest value in the data. You can use the Color tab on the properties palette to change the color associated with the lowest value and missing data. The color of the elements will change incrementally from the Low color to the High color as the values of the underlying data increase.
   • The second button controls the border color.
   • The third button controls the fill pattern. The fill pattern uses the border color. Therefore, the fill pattern is visible only if there is a visible border color.
   • The fourth control is a slider and text box that control the opacity of the fill color and pattern. A lower percentage means less opacity and more transparency. 100% is fully opaque (no transparency).
3. To change the dashing of a border or line, use the line toolbar.

   Note: This toolbar does not reflect the state of the current selection.

   As with the other toolbar, you can click the button to select the displayed option or click the drop-down arrow to choose another option.