Introduction

Specifying Traffic Lights


"Traffic lighting" or "exception reporting" is a way to call attention to information that differs in some significant way from the rest of the data. It alerts you to information that may be important to make decisions upon.

A traffic light is made up of one or more conditions. When a condition is met, specified colors are applied to the data.

To add a new traffic light:

  1. Select the data on which you want to set the traffic light.
    You can select one or multiple column headers, row headers, or a range of data cells using the Ctrl and Shift keys. This is how you set the scope for your traffic light.
  2. Right-click and select Advanced > Traffic Lights....
    The New Traffic Light dialog pops up.
    Notice the scope you selected for the traffic light is displayed at the bottom, and the first condition is automatically added for you to configure. If the scope is not what you want, cancel out the dialog and go back to step 1 to reselect the desired columns headers, rows headers, or data cells using the Ctrl and Shift keys.
  3. To add another condition, click the Add Condition button at the bottom left. For a common three-condition traffic light, you can use the Condition Wizard by clicking the Condition Wizard... button on the upper left. Conditions created using the Condition Wizard can be modified or removed to meet your need.

    Note

    The order of the conditions is important. Each data cell value is evaluated against all defined conditions, starting with condition 1 to the highest defined condition. The first condition that matches the data cell's value and scope is the only alert applied to that cell.


  4. For each condition in the traffic light:
  5. Enter a descriptive name for this traffic light.
    This name will be used in the Manage Traffic Lights dialog. This dialog lets you edit, remove, and set the order in which the traffic lights should be applied.
  6. If you want the entire data row to be highlighted if the condition is met, check the Highlight Entire Row check box. By default, only the data cell that meets the condition is highlighted.
  7. To apply the traffic light, click Apply. Or click OK to apply the traffic light and close the dialog.

Condition Wizard

The Condition Wizard lets you create a typical traffic lighting with red, yellow, and green background colors simply by supplying the two threshold values.

To use the Condition Wizard:

  1. In the New Traffic Light dialog, click the Condition Wizard... button at the top of the dialog.
    The Traffic Light Wizard dialog pops up.
  2. Enter the two threshold values.
  3. Click OK.

The three conditions are automatically created for you in the New Traffic Light dialog. You can further modify the conditions or add more conditions.

Managing Traffic Lights

When you have multiple traffic lights with overlapping scopes, you may want to set the order in which these traffic lights are to be applied.

To bring up the Manage Traffic Lights dialog, select Tools > Manage > Traffic Lights... from the menu bar.

Note

To preserve your traffic lights, bookmark the view for later retrieval. When a bookmark is loaded later on, live data is retrieved, and all the preserved formatting and custom layout are applied. See Working with Bookmarks for details on bookmarks.

 

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