Inquiring Minds is a monthly community series to help share questions from both internal IBM staff and our customers to better understand using the IBM Apptio suite of products.  We’ve collected these questions during our live Instructor lead classes, from posts to our Ask an Instructor page on our community website, and general questions that have been shared with the Education team.  We hope this helps and look forward to answering more questions in the future!

This month our highlighted question is from a student who wanted a deeper understanding of our Color Spec setting in Report Studio. We offer two options, setting custom colors for an entire project or for only a single chart.  For the directions on making this a project wide setting visit the Apptio Help center link here , but we’ll be focusing on updating custom colors for only a single chart.

To get to the Color Spec setting, right click on your chart and in the pop-up, menu choose Properties.  In the Properties pop up, we’ll be on the Chart Tab and entering our choices into the Color Spec field.  Now we just have to enter a string that determines what colors we’d like to use.  Our color choices are:

• String Language: To select the colors, first call for the item to be colored, add an equal sign, then the color.  If you’d like to add multiple colors use a semi-colon to separate the two color requests.  An example of a string might be Amazon Web Services=red;Great Plains=blue.  Remember not to add any extra unneeded spaces!
• Flat colors: black, gray, lightgray, darkgray, white. "Transparent" can be used too but be careful!  It will effectively make a bar or line invisible in your chart.
• Gradient colors: blue, red, green, yellow, violet, brown, skyblue, lightgreen, orange, darkblue, darkgreen, purple, aqua, pink, teal, crimson are all supported.
• Blocking colors: If you’d like to block a color from appearing in a chart you can even add a ! character before a color spec.  For instance a string of Cost=blue;Budget=green;!purple would mean that Cost is blue, Budget is green and to not use purple.
• Hex Codes:  Hex codes can also be used, for instance Cost=#082f6d could be used to say that Cost shows in blue. Pro-Tip:  This is a great way to use your company specific colors!  Check with your internal teams to find the specific hex codes your organization uses. 

Here are our available colors: