Using slide:ology colors in Entrance

[Tod Landis]

In this note I'll show how to use the color palettes in "slide:ology" by Nancy Duarte (those of us who spoke at the MySQl Conference received it as a nice gift from O'Reilly).

Step 1 is to download Entrance Community edition from our web site: http://dbentrance.com/. You need JRE 1.6 or better and access to a MySQL server to run it. Simply unzip the download and start the program with "java -jar entrance.jar".

To make a chart, click "New" and enter a PLOT command:

   plot

       axislabels, red bar, blue bar, green bar

   select "label", 1, 2, 3;

The SELECT part of the command can be almost any MySQL SELECT statement. (e.g. unfortunately you can't change delimiters yet).

Click "Run" and you have the chart. Now to replace those eye-scorching colors with something better from the book. Take a look at the section "Using the Power of Color" on pages 130-131 and you will find a collection of RGB values for color palettes. Any of these can be used in Entrance. For example, here is "Earthy":

   -- Earthy palette from slide:ology

   plot 

      axislabels, rgb(72,107,28) bar, rgb(101,141,43) bar,

            rgb(144,193,62) bar

   select "label", 1, 2, 3;

Once you have entered a palette you can copy and paste it as text to other scripts. Be careful not to put any spaces in the rgb() values or Entrance will complain, and be careful that the chart series you list in the "plot part" match up 1-to-1 with columns in the "select part".

Now you can do things like adding titles, legends, gridlines and so on using the syntax described here: http://dbentrance.com/newdocs/plotsyntax.html. There are also examples in the Entrance blog.

Ask questions here and I will answer. Happy charting!