When you color a report, there's a lot that can go wrong. Sometimes, the best color is none at all. We'll explain why and how DeltaMaster supports the proper coloring.

For the Chinese, the color red means good luck. For us, however, it symbolizes danger. The perception of colors not only differs among nations but also among people within a single culture, company or even family.

Even displaying colors in different media - monitors, LCD projectors, printers - is difficult. Every person who uses more than one monitor on his desk knows that one and the same color can look completely different on two separate screens.

Generally, DeltaMaster manages to work with just two colors. Numbers that have a positive effect on margin are blue. Those that have a negative effect are red. We have avoided the color green entirely because many more people have problems correctly identifying this color than you might think. That the founder of our company is one of them, however, is just a rumor.

Blue is good and red is bad, regardless of arithmetic signs and accounting rules. The business implications are all that count.

Regardless of the arithmetic signs and accounting rules, DeltaMaster automatically shows what is good (blue) and bad (red) for margin, EBIT, profitability, etc. We use blue instead of green. And at least 5 % of all men are grateful for that.

We generally advise not to use colors to designate categories. Users have to learn these random classifications such as Product Group X is always purple and Product Group Y is always yellow. In addition, we tend to quickly run out of colors that are easy to differentiate. And, of course, we think that a good report should also work as a black-and-white handout.

If you absolutely have to use colors to differentiate objects, please at least be consistent. We often see cases in which a color means "revenues" in one report, "budget" in the next, and then nothing besides decoration in the third. DeltaMaster supports this uniformity in the "Notation" dialogue box. Once you have defined the formatting rules, DeltaMaster will apply them in all of your reports.

Using - or avoiding - color also plays an important role in other aspects of DeltaMaster. Check back later to learn more.

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