Skip to main content
Workday User Guide
Last Updated: 2023-06-23
Concept: Color in Discovery Boards

Concept: Color in Discovery Boards

You can use color in discovery boards to apply more meaning to your vizzes. We provide a variety of color palettes to help differentiate data across vizzes. Use the Formatting panel to make color selections for:
  • Board level: Select a palette and specify any field value overrides.
  • Viz level: Select a viz and specify any field value overrides.

Palettes and Overrides

You pick a color palette for a board and then assign colors that are meaningful. Example: You could assign colors to represent specific products or functional areas; a company could use the branding colors of the top 5 competitors on its vizzes to quickly identify each product while analyzing the data.
You can change the overall color aesthetic on discovery boards without having to change each viz manually. You can select from a variety of color palettes, including ones that are color-blind friendly or high contrast to differentiate colors more easily.
You can override field value colors for most viz types:
Viz Type
Overrides Available
Bar Chart
Yes
Line Chart
Yes
Area Chart
Yes
Scatterplot
Yes
Heatmap
No
KPI
NA
Waterfall
Yes
Chart
Yes
Donut Chart
Yes

Color Assignment Rules and Considerations

  • Colors from the selected palette are assigned dynamically, so the color assignment might change based on the data in the viz. If you want to apply a specific color to a data value, assign the color manually as an override to persist the color. Color assignments made by the system are based on the legend items returned in the viz query, which takes instance-level and cell-level security into consideration.
  • Color assignments for measures apply to all data sources used on the board. Color assignments for dimensions are specific to the data source and can be different.
  • Color assignments depend on whether there's a field in the Color drop zone on the Builder panel. Until there’s a dimension in the Color drop zone, color assignments are driven by measures.
  • Color assignments are persisted when switching between chart types that support color assignments.
  • For Waterfall charts, there's a 4-color palette that represents the start, increase, decrease, and total data values. You can swap the increase and decrease colors from the palette to make those selections more meaningful. Example: For a decrease that is actually a positive trend, assign a color that visually represents the trend (green instead of red).