Adding rules to a conditional formatting specification

Emphasize significant information or de-emphasize information of lower importance by adding rules to a conditional formatting. Applying a specification to your chart that contains rules changes the appearance of chart items, based on their properties.

About this task

A conditional formatting rule applies formatting to chart items, you specify what the actions are based on, and the action that you want to apply.

A conditional formatting rule is defined over four steps, involving:

  • Choosing the type of item or representation to be formatted.
  • Choosing the criteria to identify items, such as links with the Transaction attribute, or event frames with the Day of Week analysis attribute.
  • Choosing a style to change, such as enlargement or shade color.
  • Specifying how the style changes, by selecting a particular value, or by looking up a value in a table for example.
Note: The options available for changing the style depend on the choices you make in earlier steps.

Procedure

To define a rule:
  1. In the Edit Conditional Formatting Specification window, click New to show the New Rule window.
  2. In the Items to be formatted section, select the item type to apply the rule to by selecting Entities or Links. If you select Entites, you also need to select the types of representation to apply the rule to.
  3. In the Item criteria section, select what the rule is based on by selecting an option:
    • All items - create an unconditional rule that is applied to all items of the selected representation.
    • Items that contain records - set up rules that apply to items with records that contain specific property types.
    • Items with attribute - set up rules that apply to items with a specified attribute.
    • Items with analysis attribute - set up rules that apply to items with a specified analysis attribute.
  4. In the Style to be changed section, select the aspect of style to be changed.
    For example, the rule can change the enlargement of the icon on the chart, or the color of links.
  5. In the Style will be changed to section, specify how the style is changed by selecting an option. For some styles, you must click Edit to specify more options in another window.

    You can set the style:

    Note: To leave the style unchanged, select Leave unchanged.
  6. Optional: In the Options section, you can specify the behavior of subsequent rules and the styling of items that do not match your rule:
    • Prevent later rules changing the chart item style - locks the style for items that are matched by the current rule. This locking information is listed in the Edit Conditional Formatting Specification window for the current rule.
    • For items which don't match the rule, set the chart item style to - select the behavior of items that do not match the rule:
      • To a specified value:
        • Select Shown or Hidden to set Visibility.
        • Select Specified Value and choose a style setting from the list set Font Style, Enlargement, Icon Frame Margin, Line Width, or Line Strength.
        • Select Specified Value and choose a color from the color picker to set shade or icon frame color.
        • Select Specified Value and click Edit to set an entity or link type.
      To leave the style unchanged, select Leave unchanged.
  7. To save the rule, click OK.

Results

New rules are added to the end of the list of rules for the conditional formatting specification.

What to do next

After you complete a rule, you can continue to add and edit rules until you are ready to apply the specification to the chart. See Applying a conditional formatting specification for details.