Match report colors with your company’s style guide using text mode

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Match report colors with your company’s style guide using text mode.

Do you have list reports or custom views that use conditional formatting, or column rules, so that a color can be applied to a specific row or cell? Did you know that you can use basic text mode to get those colors to match your company’s style guide?

There are a few places in Workfront where you can select a custom color:

• Milestones
• Custom statuses, priorities, and severities
• Custom chart colors
• Branding colors

When specifying a color in Workfront, you have two choices:

• Select from the color palette, which will also give you the RGB code of the color you select from the color spectrum (green = 39aa00, as seen in the image below).
• Use an existing RGB code (from your company's style guide, for example), which will give you the specific color corresponding to that code.

Whether you select the color from a color palette in Workfront or find the RGB code in another application, you can use the RGB code in Workfront wherever an editable color code is found.

NOTE: In Workfront, there is one place that uses an RGB color code but doesn’t have a palette option, only eight standard colors. That’s the conditional formatting feature in list reports, also known as column rules.

In the dashboard above, the Work-to-Commit Ratio Status Chart (top right) has four colors assigned to the various statuses shown in the report. These colors were assigned using the custom colors feature on the Chart tab in the report builder.

In the Velocity Status List Report (bottom of the dashboard), conditional formatting was used to assign colors to those same statuses. As you can see, the colors do not match exactly. In order to get the color associated with your column rule to match that of a chart, milestone, priority or your company's style guide, text mode must be applied.

Let’s walk through an example. 

You want to make the yellow column rule in the Work-to-Commit Ratio Status column match the bright yellow color being used in the Work-to-Commit Ratio Status Chart. You can do that with basic text mode, following these steps. 

1. Start by editing the Work-to-Commit Ratio Status Chart. When you navigate to the Chart tab of the report, you can see that custom colors have been defined for the various status names. The color for the status Poor is yellow, and that’s the yellow color you want to use in both the chart and list report. Copy the six characters of the RGB code from here. In this example, they are ffeb3b.
2. Next, edit the Velocity Status List Report to change the color of the column rule. When you select the Work-to-Commit Ratio Status column and click Advanced Options, you can see a list of column rules. Notice how the second rule has been set to show the background color of yellow when the status is Poor. That’s a different yellow and doesn’t match the yellow in the chart.
3. You want to find the RGB code for the Column Rule yellow and replace it with the RGB code for the Chart yellow. Start by switching to text mode in the top-right corner. Your screen should now look like this:  
4. Notice that the word Poor appears once in the text mode box. The code here (shown below) is checking to see if the Work-to-Commit Ratio Status is Poor. If it meets the criteria, the system will apply a background color of feecc8, which is the RGB code of the color yellow as it appears in this column rule.                           
   1.        styledef.case.1.comparison.righttext=Poor
   2.        styledef.case.1.comparison.trueproperty.0.name=bgcolor
   3.        styledef.case.1.comparison.trueproperty.0.value=feecc8
5. Replace that existing color code with the RGB code of ffeb3b, which you copied from the Chart tab (see below). Once you save and close, the color associated with the column rule matches the color on the chart!

            styledef.case.1.comparison.righttext=Poor

            styledef.case.1.comparison.trueproperty.0.name=bgcolor

            styledef.case.1.comparison.trueproperty.0.value=ffeb3b

Here’s what the report will look like with matching colors:

If you have already taken the Report Creation courses within Ascent and want to learn more about text mode, register here for Advanced Reporting, Part 1, the live, instructor-led webinar set for Tuesday, October 8 at 8 am (MST). Pro Tip: live classes offer topic-based Q&A time - come with your questions!

For additional information or further text mode instruction, check out the article, Understanding Common Uses of Text Mode, located on the Experience site. 

If you have any questions, comments, or additional use cases for matching custom colors, please share those details in the comments section below. Please “like” this post, if you found it helpful!