Overview
As you may have noticed by now, Platform Analytics doesn’t display any field styling you might have before. This can be a problem, especially with reports that make a heavy use of this feature to highlight good, neutral or bad situations. The most typical case would be the project reports showing whether their finance, timeline, etc… is at risk or not. On this blog post I will be showing you an alternative way to achieve this.
OOB Project aspect
Let’s create a new project on our instance to show how the report would look like OOB. The Status field is the one we’ll be paying attention to, since its values are: Red, Yellow or Red.
If we create a new list element to a given dashboard, we will see this as a result:
It’s not so easy to understand the status of this project is Green, particularly if there are hundreds of projects going on.
Custom Project aspect
If we go to the dictionary entry for the “Status” field on “pm_project” we will see these are the OOB choices defined:
The characters we will be using on this example are these:
🔴🟡🟢
They are not icons, therefore can be used in a “String” field like the “Label” on choices. All we have to do is copy and paste before the current content of the label field. This is the aspect of the fields once edited:
Now if we go back to the Project Management dashboard we had before, we will be able to see a green ball close to the Green status, making it extremely easy to spot how the project is looking like at a glance.
Note: Bear in mind that this solution works in the majority of OS and browsers, but there are some limitations such as Windows 8 or below as these characters came with Unicode 12.0 (2019). If your company uses this OS then this is not a valid approach.
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