How to Color-Coding Rows for Quickbase Reports

Drawing attention to critical details will save time and create action.

Some common scenarios that you might encounter where color coding rows in your report would be beneficial are:

✓ Highlight data that is “on track”

✓ Show attention to a problem

✓Ease of identifying action items

You can switch between three color-coding methods available in the report builder:

✓ Selecting colors

✓ Writing a formula

✓ Default color-coding

Color-Coding by Selecting Colors:

• Text – Including Multiple Choice and Multi-Select
• Email
• Components of an Address Field, like street or state
• Formula Text and Email
• Checkbox and Formula – Checkbox

1. Open up a report you would like to start customizing and select the Customize this Report key icon from the upper right corner.

1. Navigate towards the bottom of the report builder and locate section heading, Color-Coding.

1. In the Color-Coding Section of the report builder, select the radio button Assign to choices.

✓ Select the field you want to color-code. Quick base creates up to 10 unique color options.

✓ You can assign colors for any field values without a color – up to a maximum of 10 options.

You can customize color assignments by:

✓ Selecting a different color from the color palette.

✓ Selecting a different field value from the drop down.

✓ Removing the color by selecting the Remove icon.

✓ Adding a color by selecting a field value, then selecting a color.

1. Select Display to preview your work or select Save to save your work.

Color-coding by Writing a Formula:

Sometimes the built-in color-coding rules in Quick Base don’t go quite far enough. Adding your own colorization formula can use conditional logic based on multiple fields to provide a power boost to help you do things the built-in rules can’t do.

1. Navigate to the upper right corner and select the Customize this Report key icon.

1. Navigate towards the bottom of the report builder and locate section heading, Color-Coding.

1. In the Color-Coding section of the report building, select Write a formula.

✓ In the formula editor, enter a formula that defines color assignments.

✓ The formula input must tell Quick Base the conditions needed to assign a color. In most cases, formulas use IF or CASE statements to define the conditions.

✓ The formula must return the colors as text in HTML color names like “Blue,” or “Orange.”

Here is an example of a simple colorization formula where any Account Numbers equal to “2026000” will be highlighted in Blue and Account Numbers equal to “87100” will be highlighted in Orange.

Before:

Result:

1. Select Display to preview your work or select Save to save your work.

Specifying Default Color-Coding:

– BEST PRACTICE: Keep in mind, this option will change the coloring on all reports that are set to default color-coding, but it’s not best practice unless you want all reports to be color-coded initially.

1. Navigate to the upper right corner and select the Customize this Report key icon.

1. Navigate towards the bottom of the report builder and locate section heading, Color-Coding and select Default.

1. Select the hyperlink Change in parentheses. This will redirect you to the Default Report Settings.
2. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and under the Color-Coding section select Assign to choice in.

You can customize color assignments by:

✓ Selecting a different color from the color palette.

✓ Selecting a different field value from the drop-down.

✓ Removing the color by selecting the Remove icon.

✓ Adding color by selecting a field value, then selecting a color.

1. Select Save.

Removing Color-Coding:

1. Navigate to the upper right corner and select the Customize this Report key icon.

1. In the Color-Coding section of the report builder, select None.

1. Select Save.

To learn more ways to customize your reports in Quick Base, check out more articles here: Reporting & Dashboards.

• Author: Alex Skudrovskis
• Email: askudrovskis@quandarycg.com)
• Date Submitted: 1/17/2019