Hey all,
I’ve been making a few charts for my business to visualise a bunch of data in our project management system.
And generally, we are finding it a really powerful way to get a top-down view on a tonne of stuff.
However, we are REALLY struggling with the auto-colouring.
When you have three charts - all related - above each other on a page, it becomes extremely confusing when an item in one chart is a different colour to the same item in the next chart.
So “sound post income” in a monthly income bar chart might be blue, but in a pie chart for the year to show percentages, its yellow. Repeat for three or four different items, and its confusing. Turns out people pay WAY more attention to colours than they do the labels!
Help files say there’s currently no way of assigning colours. However, my brief time with coda has told me that there’s often hacks / undocumented ways around some of these things???
See here from our test data (I’m just playing with things here)
Well, tbh the charts in your example seem to operate on different data in the first place.
But you’re right, there’s no way to assign colors. However the order of colors depends on the natural order of your data (i.e. which of the segments the chart encounters first, second etc). And you can affect this order with sorting.
In your data sets add a column e.g. Display order that you’ll then use to sort your data sets so that the chart engine picks them in your desired order and assigns colors in that order (blue, yellow, green, red etc).
I’m not at my computer right now to test, but IIRC it should work that way.
1 Like
Oh - knowing that the colours are assigned in order makes ALL the difference! 
This will hopefully get me over the line.
The data is the same (ish) - one is monthly aggregated, the other is percentage over a year, but its still the same 3 categories (Sound Post, Music Composition, Music Licenses). The fourth category of the monthly income is just all three added together (which in the pie chart is 100%)
