topic SAS Report Designer Default Color Consistency in SAS Visual Analytics

SAS Report Designer Default Color Consistency

tfarkas — Wed, 24 Oct 2018 18:16:56 GMT

I am building a report that shows change in school enrollment throughout a registration period using two line graphs: one that shows a full registration period (150 days), and another that focuses on a 4 week period centered on the current day using a simple filter. In both graphs, I am grouping the data by semester, so that users can compare enrollment trends for different semesters. I am also allowing users the option to select which terms to compare by linking a (control) list of 30 semesters to both line graphs. They may want to compare up to 5 semesters or so.

Unfortunately, I am finding that the default colors assigned to each semester differs between the two graphs, so that it will be confusing to the user which is semester is which. I realize that I could use a display rule to force each term to a specific color, but there are 30 semesters, so this really isn't a viable option. Even if I did use display rules, the many of the 30 colors will be very similar, so some combinations of semesters will not have sufficiently distinguishing colors.

Does anybody know what is going on here or how to fix this problem? I have tried both a forked interaction, in which the semester control points to both graphs, and a path interaction, in which the larger-scoped graph points to the smaller-scoped graph. Both show the same problem.

Thanks in advance.

Re: SAS Report Designer Default Color Consistency

FredrikE — Thu, 25 Oct 2018 08:19:02 GMT

One way could be to make sure that the semester dim is sorted the same way for both graphs, if both graph has the same semesters the also should get the same colors.

The problem is when one of them miss one semester in the interval and the other don't, then the colors get out of sync...

//Fredrik

Re: SAS Report Designer Default Color Consistency

tfarkas — Fri, 26 Oct 2018 17:17:23 GMT

Thanks, Fredrick. Both graphs use the same 4 semesters, so if I understand you correctly, this wouldn't be the source of my problem. Any other ideas? What if the x-values in one semester were not all represented in another semester. Could that lead to this problem?

tim