Quick little trick today using a parameter to control what is colored on a visualization.
I don’t know how many times I have been presented with the “Color the good things green and the bad things red” dilemma? How many times have you heard it?
Too many to count I’m sure… I woke up this morning and was playing around with parameters and came up with a possible solution to appease their need for Green and Red, and our need to follow best practices around accessibility.
First I created a parameter that gave me the options to Highlight the Bad, Highlight the Good or turn the highlighting off.
The next was to create a calculation that would look at the parameter value and the profit value. Each combination would return a value that I could assign a to a color.
Next I dropped my calculation on color, showed the parameter control and assigned the colors for each parameter value.
Simple little trick, but it allows you to focus on the important metrics, whether they are “good” or “bad”