Making inputs more visible to end user

Question

Is there a way to may inputs really stick out when a user is looking a module? I would like for people using my dashboards to be see the diffference betweeen calculated fields and inputs i.e. shading, borders, etc. Thanks Joe

PrevContributor · Accepted Answer

Hi Joe,

One way of doing this would be to set up conditional formatting in those modules where you want to draw attention to the input vs calculated cells. See screenshot attached for simple example.
To do this, you can follow these steps:

1. Create a new line item called "formatting" - remove all dimensionality of this (this way it will not be taking up a lot of model size).
2. Enter "1" as the formula (Note: if you want totals not to be highlighted, then you need to have one dimension included, and set the "summary" column in the blueprint to "None".)
3. Hide that line item in the module
4. Set up conditional formatting on the input line items, based on the values from the line item "Formatting" (conditional formatting is an icon in the toolbar that looks like multiple colored boxes in a grid)
5. Use a 2 color scale, choose the base color you want. Make the 'minimum' = 0, and to make the highlight color more subtle, you could put the 'maximum' as 4 or 5, or play with it to figure out the shading you like. 
6. You can use the same pattern for all of the input line items you'd like to have highlighted.
7. Dont forget to save the view of the module, otherwise the conditional formatting won't be saved!

You could apply this in other ways as well - for exmaple if you want to only highlight input cells that are not populated, then you'd need to write a formula in the fomatting cell, such as IF Isnotblank(Line item) then 0 else 1.

It is a bit manual, but can actually be done fairly quickly. Hopefully this can help you get what you're looking for!