Base colors in TARGIT

Colors in TARGIT can be utilized in different ways with different pros and cons.

Here is an overview of the options and the pros and cons of each option.

Color Sequences

You can use color sequences, which makes TARGIT work much in the same way as Excel.

TARGIT comes with a default color sequence consisting of 12 colors like shown below.
There's also a number of other color sequences that you can utilize right away - and finally you can make your own color sequence which will then appear as an option on the list of color sequences.

Pros:
You get the same behavior as excel, where 1 series in a column chart will use the 1st color of the color sequence, and adding one more series will use the 2nd color etc. 

That means that you can control coloring of future series

Just showing 2019 in the barchart will assign 2019 with the first color in the sequence:

When a year is added - we already know what will happen - the next year will be assigned the second color in the sequence - that's a nice control of the future...

Cons:

You might have one barchart where Revenue is assigned the first color in a sequence (Purple) and Cost is assigned the second color (Light Blue).

Then you create a new graph - only on cost - which is now assigned the first color of the sequence (Purple).

Result - the same measure might sometimes be blue and other times orange - depending on which number of measure or series it will be in the current graph.
This will also be the case if you have time series - a certain year might have different colors depending on how far in the sequence you are.

Look at this graph - with a filter of 2020, 2021 and 2022, the years are colored by the first 3 colors in the color sequence:

When adding 2019 to the filter - all colors "move 1 up" - which means that the years change color

Shared/Object colors

You can choose to assign a certain color to a measure or even a dimension value.

In this case the color is set to color by measure 

And if you hit the pencil symbol you get the option to assign a shared/object color to the 2 measures in the current object (Cost and Invoice Cost)

Replacing the Shared Color for Costs will result in every graph that uses Costs and color by measure, will replace the color with whatever color you choose as the shared color.

Assigning an object color is a completely local decision - only affecting the current graph.

You can also color by dimension value (in this case Customer Country):

Using the pencil symbol will now give you these options:

- again you can associate a shared color with a specific value or just assign the color in the local object

Pros:

Now you can associate a certain color (Purple) with Cost as an example. That means that most of the graph types will respect this association, and you can create an understanding in your company, that Cost will always appear purple in a graph.

Cons:

If you use piecharts, donutcharts, maps or other types of charts that don't really work with one single color, the idea of coloring by shared measure color will not work.

Also - it's not possible to color future measures or future dimension values using the shared colors.

Automatic

Out of the box TARGIT will suggest that you color Automatic:

Automatic means that TARGIT will choose for you - depending on the graph type.

So for column charts, bar charts, line charts, area charts etc, TARGIT will assume that you want to color every bar or all areas with the same color. This will be a suggested shared color for the measure.

While with donut charts, pie charts, maps etc - TARGIT will assume that you want to color each piece of pie, donut or area with different colors. That will be a suggested shared color for each dimension value.

Automatic is just a way of making TARGIT show some meaning full colors - you shouldn't stay with this choice in your implementation.

What to choose?

Most common is to make one or more color sequences and go with these. 
If a certain measure (or dimension value) makes sense to always color by a certain color - you could used the shared color method for some things in your TARGIT Solution.

Notice:

If you intend to move your TARGIT document to another server, you need to make sure that your color sequences or choices of shared color is transferred with that moved TARGIT Analysis. 
That basically means moving a lot of settings files with your analysis.

The only other way to make sure that your colors are "preserved" if you only move the TARGIT document, is to go with local object colors.