Data colouring in Omniscope Evo

Picking the right colours for your data visualisation can make all the difference - just like picking the colours for your home... There are countless websites offering advice on how to select a diverse palette, or when to stick to hues of one colour. 

Omniscope will offer you choice between several default colour schemas and this article will show you how to customise the result, depending on the field type.

Colouring by field value

Text fields will have different colour allocated for each value. To edit the defaults click on the 3-dot menu next to the field name (here [Truck Model]) and you could reset all the colours by clicking on the 'Distribute colours' button. If you click multiple times on this button you will get several random colour distributions. 

For some values you may wish to pick the colours individually by using the colour picker or entering the hexadecimal value.

Once you've found a nice distribution, you could copy the settings (copy button) and paste them in the same colour options window on another field, that contains these same values (here model names AA, BB etc.)

Numeric and Date fields will have continuous colouring schema, going from min to max, with an optional middle value colouring. Our defaults are navy min -  yellow max, and you can access the options by clicking on the same 3-dot menu to pick your own range colours.

Tip: 

Try ColourBrewer for some inspiration :

#e5f5f9 min

#99d8c9 middle

#2ca25f max

Numeric field - individually coloured values

In a situation when you have a small number of numeric or date values, and you wish to colour each value differently, you can make changes in the Field organiser block (in the data preparation) to either change the data type (integer->text) or duplicate the field in question and format the new field as text.

You may also consider setting the colour thresholds for continuous values in an existing field - see below - by using the "Fixed values" colouring option.

Colouring by Measure field

If your visualisation is comparing different categories by using multiple numeric KPIs - for example comparing 4 car models by mean distance covered, min and max capacity, then you might wish to use colour to highlight the different measurements. In this case you will be colouring by Measure names, by dragging this item from the data menu to your chart 'colouring shelf'.  Each measure field will now have just one value associated and you can amend this setting by clicking on the little arrow drop down next to each measure in your 'Measure shelf'. 

Tip: start the 'measure layering' process by dragging the Measure names to the Colouring or Layering options next to the chart (in the Line view each line will represent one measure). Omniscope will add the 'Measure shelf' under your field list on the sidebar, where you can drag all the fields you wish to use as KPIs. 

In the same menu below you can pick the statistical function for the field and the colour to represent it - green here for  the [Start battery level].

On top of all this you can add Formula measures to the KPI list. 

Field organiser block formulas (workflow level) or the calculated fields in the Report data sources (individual report level) might be calculated on a row level or other aggregation level. When a formula measure is added on a chart level it will automatically be applied to the data aggregation field used for the Split option. 

Here everything will be calculated on a [Model] level, while being responsive to different field filtering. Colouring and naming for this formula measure can be found when you click on the f(x) arrow drop down button.