Formatting Panel

You can use the Formatting panel in Publish Pro to change the appearance of the visuals and panels included in your publication. If your visual is not linked to a Discovery (it has been "unlinked"), you can edit all relevant formatting options, including Panel Settings. If your visual is linked to a Discovery, or is a visual area from Tabulate, you can only format the Panel Settings in Publish; any other formatting (for example, editing the text for your legend) must be done in the linked app.

Note: When you change formatting options inside a publication, your changes only impact that publication. When you open the linked visual in its source app, any formatting changes you make apply anywhere the visual appears.

  • Click here to learn how to unlink content

Opening the Formatting Panel

Formatting Selector

The Formatting panel can be opened and pinned as needed.

  1. From the left-hand Toolbox, click Formatting Selector.

    This transforms the canvas into an intuitive, point-and-click formatting area. Hover your cursor over the content items on the canvas to highlight them for selection.

  2. Click the content item that you want to format.

    Clicking an "activated" component opens its formatting options in the Formatting panel.

  3. Update the formatting options as appropriate to your requirements.

The options that are selected in the Formatting panel depend on the content item that you have selected. For details about the options in this panel, see Formatting Panel.

When in the formatting selection mode, selected editable items are displayed with a blue border:

Formatting Panel

Unlinked Discovery

 

Where the selected visual is local to this publication (that is, it is part of this publication and not linked to a Discovery), you can edit any of its formatting in Publish. Because the visual is unlinked, your formatting changes in Publish will not affect the original visual in Discover.

For unlinked visuals, the Formatting panel contains a Component drop-down list (green highlight), which allows you to select:

  • The options associated with the selected visualization type, such as Report Title, Data Labels, Legend, and so on. (If you're working on a grid, grid options are shown; if you're working on a pie chart, formatting options for pie charts are shown.) These options are described in the Discovery Pro section: Formatting Panel.
  • Panel Settings: These formatting options are specific to the panel that contains the visual when it is shown in the publication, indicating its general look and feel and that of its title and subtitle. For more details, see Panel Settings.

Notes:

  • The Formatting panel contains multiple tabs (red arrow), with each tab addressing different formatting options for the selected item. For example, when the component Legend is selected, there are tabs for general settings, the legend's title, and so on.
  • Alongside the Components drop-down is a Reset option (blue arrow). Use this option to reset the formatting options back to their default state.

Linked Discovery or Other Type

 

The Component drop-down list (see previous) is locked where the selected visual is:

  • Linked to a Discovery.
  • A Tabulate visual area.
  • A container for a mini tab or table layout.

In these cases, only the publication-specific formatting options are offered in Publish. You can use the Panel Settings options to format the panel containing the visual when it is shown in the publication, indicating its general look and feel, and the look and feel of its title and subtitle.

If you want to make other formatting changes to a visual of this type, you can either:

  • Open the linked visual or visual area in Discover or Tabulate using the right-click Open in... option. Note: You will not be able to edit the Panel Settings in this view, since the Panel Settings are specific to the publication. You will be able to edit formatting options that are relevant to the discovery or spreadsheet wherever it is shown.
  • Unlink the linked visual from its Discovery. To do this, you can select the item, right-click, and select unlink. Once it has been unlinked, the Formatting panel (when expanded) will display the item's formatting options as described above. Any formatting changes made to an unlinked item will be applied only to the selected unlinked item; other instances of the item (the original instance in Discover) will not be affected.

Formatting Settings

The Formatting panel is available in Discover, Present, Publish, and Tabulate. In each of these modules, the Formatting panel shows some or all of the same formatting options. For details about applying various formatting changes to different visualization types, review the documentation in the Discover Pro section: Formatting Panel.

In addition to the common Formatting panel content, Publish Pro also offers formatting options relating to the panels that you include on your pages. For information about these settings, see Panel Settings.