Highlight chart items

You can use Highlight Items to emphasize selected entities and links on the chart.

About this task

The Highlight Items function in Analyst's Notebook helps to draw attention to selected chart items. This is particularly useful when your chart contains a lot of information. The highlight feature is selected or cleared as you need it, and cannot be saved to the chart. You can emphasize enities and links with both color and animation. You can select multiple items to highlight, change the default color, and you can turn the animation effects on or off.
Note:
You must have the Animate Chart Effects and Interactions option enabled to use the non-Static effects for Entities, Theme Lines, Links, and Links with Direction.

Procedure

  1. Select the entities and/or links that you want to highlight. To quickly apply highlighting to these items, press Ctrl + Alt + H or click Highlight Items on the Analyze tab of the ribbon. You can toggle highlighting on or off when you click Highlight Items.
  2. Alternatively, select the entities and/or links that you want to highlight, and click the drop-down menu on the Highlight Items option.
  3. In the Items section, choose Highlight Items. Highlighting is applied to all selected items on the chart.
  4. You can then add more items to those already highlighted. Select additional items and click either Highlight Selected Links or Highlight Selected Entities. These new items are highlighted alongside those that already have highlighting applied. When highlighted, the items are deselected on the chart by default, however you can choose to Select Highighted Items to reinstate them. Alternatively you can turn the option off in Effect Options. Click Deselect when Highlighting to remove the tick.
  5. Having already highlighted a number of items, you might want to move on to a different selection. In this scenario, select the new items and press Ctrl + H, or use Replace Highlighted Items from the drop-down menu. This removes all highlight effects from previous items and applies them to your new selection.
  6. To remove highlighting from selected items, click Remove from Highlighter or press Ctrl + Shift + H. If you choose Remove All from Highlighter, the highlight effects are removed from all chart items whether they are selected or not.
  7. You can change the default color in the Effect Options section of the Highlight Items menu. This opens the Display page, also accesssible from File > Options > Display. Click the drop-down arrow next to Highlighter, choose a different color, then click OK.
  8. If your entities and links have different frame or line colors, you can change the highlight color to match in the Effect Options section of the menu.
  9. Use the Effects section of the menu to apply different animations to your chart items, directed links and theme lines, such as a revolving circle around entities, and marching dashes to show the direction of a link relationship. You can also highlight entities and theme lines with a label effect on entities and theme lines, however you can only apply one effect at a time. For example, if you have an animated circle highlighting an entity, you cannot also highlight the entity with the label effect.
  10. To change the application animation setting, click File > Options > Performance. If Animate Chart Effects and Interactions is selected, the highlight feature uses animation. Deselect the option if you want static highlighting and click OK.