Overview

Spotfire 3.1 provides innovative new ways to color visualizations and tables, and provides new methods to manage and share the color schemes you use most often.  Color in 3.1 can be configured based on static values, based on dynamic calculations that refresh as you manipulate the data, based on values that the user controls manually, or even based on relative definitions such as ‘top 5.’  You can easily update and propagate color schemes in your applications, and you can share schemes with your organization saving them to the Spotfire Library.  Please read below for a full summary of color improvements in 3.1.

Rule Based Coloring

Often analysts want to values to jump out at them based on simple concepts like the ‘top and bottom 5’ or ‘everything over 100.’  Spotfire 3.1 makes it extremely easy to configure visuals to be colored in these ways.  For example, to see top 5th percentile of values in a cross table, simply create a rule to color all values greater than the 95th percentile.  See the sequential screenshots below that illustrate assigning blue to the top 5th percentile of values in a cross table.

You can apply more than one color rule at the same time.  for example, You can set separate colors for the top 5 and the bottom 5 values at once.

You may also assign rules even if there are other coloring schemes in place.  For example, you can choose a gradient color scheme to transition color from minimum to maximum values, but then create a rule to color the highest value a special standout color.

Coloring the Table

In Spotfire 3.1 you can set a color scheme for one or more columns in a Table view, making it easy to notice rows of interest.  You can independently color different columns as needed.  In the example below, two different columns are colored by two independent schemes.

Coloring the Cross Table

You can set a color scheme for one or more columns in a Table view, making it easy to notice rows of interest.  You can independently color different columns as needed. 
In the example below, each column has it’s own continuous gradient scheme to highlight the values that are close to or above quota.

Gradient Coloring and Segment Coloring

Gradient and Segment coloring modes are modes are used for coloring numeric ranges.  Gradient coloring will gradually transition colors between the “anchor” points you specify, and segment coloring lets you set one fixed color for all the values in between two specified anchor points. You can set anchor points at fixed values or dynamic values like the average or median of a value range.  You may add as many anchor points as you like.  In the example below, a quintile color scheme is created by adding an anchor point for every 20th percentile in the data.

Here is a quintile gradient color scheme:

And here is a quintile segment color scheme:

Unique Value Coloring and Custom Palettes

You can set specific text values to a color. When you save and then re-apply this kind of color scheme, you have the choice to reassign specific colors to the same values, or simply apply the selection of colors to be reapplied in order.  When creating color schemes where one color is assigned per value, you can choose to simply re-apply the color selection rather than specific assignments of colors-to-values.  In this way you can create and use custom categorical palettes to apply to you categorical data instead of using the default Spotfire color schemes.

Saving and Reapplying Color Schemes

Spotfire 3.1 includes new ways to manage and share color schemes you create.

• Save your color schemes to the Library so others can use them
• When creating a new Spotfire plot, you can browse existing plots to use the color schemes you’ve already applied
• If a color scheme that you use frequently changes, there is an easy way to update all the plots in a file that you want to be updated to the new scheme
• You can still export color schemes to the file system and manage them on your own (available prior to 3.1)

Default Schemes

Spotfire has a helpful set of default color schemes to select from to help you get started …

Advanced Coloring with Custom Expressions and User Controls

If you set coloring anchors based on custom expressions, you can tie a color scheme to one or more values that the user determines on-the-fly. In this example below, the transition point between red and blue markers is determined by the slider control at the top of the page.  This makes it possible for the user to adjust the colors to help certain features stand out more or less as needed. It also makes it possible for the user to adjust more than one plot at once.  (For more on user input controls, see the article Introducing User Input Controls in 3.1)