Colors for chart

Question

Hi;

I'm in some code written years ago to render the charts in OpenXML. There's some code that, if there is no references colors.xml file for a chart, it uses some hard-coded color settings. For the chart line/bar colors themselves it uses accent1, accent2, etc. which appears to be correct. This is illustrated in the file ATE-4657.docx.

However, it also applies shade, tint, lumMod/Off to various values and that appear to be incorrect.

And it's got several different sets of transforms, that are set based on the <c:style val=""/> in the following, which strikes me as a very weird place to set color transforms for the chart.

    <mc:AlternateContent xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006">
        <mc:Choice Requires="c14"
            xmlns:c14="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/drawing/2007/8/2/chart"><c14:style
                val="102"/></mc:Choice>
        <mc:Fallback><c:style val="2"/></mc:Fallback>
    </mc:AlternateContent>

Is this something that used to be done, but now if there's no colors it's the accent colors with no transformations?

thanks - dave

Answer 1

Hi @David Thielen ,

Here's what I found.

• Table 5 shows how different styles 1 - 48 effect the different parts of a data points style depending on whether the style is for fills, lines or markers. The top row shows which columns apply for which elements and the main table shows the styles for each value. For example, these are the values for Markers for Data Points for style 2.

Markers for Data Points	↓	↓						↓
Style	Themed Effect	Themed Fill	Pattern	Themed Fill	Themed Line	Color or Pattern	Width	Pattern
2	No Effect	Subtle	2	Subtle	No Line		3	2

So a Marker for a data point, for example, the upper part of the table indicates that a marker for a data point only has Themed Effect, Themed Fill, and Pattern and the other columns are ignored. The table shows a themed effect of No Effect, a themed fill of Subtle, and a pattern value of 2 for style 2 for a marker for a data point.

• Cycling is not always 6 colors. This is determined by the color.xml. As an example: html
  <cs:colorStyle xmlns:cs="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/drawing/2012/chartStyle" xmlns:a="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/drawingml/2006/main" meth="cycle" id="12">
  <a:schemeClr val="accent2"/>
  <a:schemeClr val="accent4"/>
  <a:schemeClr val="accent6"/>
  <cs:variation/>
  <cs:variation>
  <a:lumMod val="60000"/>
  </cs:variation>
  <cs:variation>
  <a:lumMod val="80000"/>
  <a:lumOff val="20000"/>
  </cs:variation>
  ...

The above cycle has three colors (accent 2, 4, and 6). The first time through (variation) no modifications are made to these colors. On the fourth color, the second variation begins, and applies a luminance modification to accent 2. The variations depend on the color style, which have defaults based on the style number is.

• I was not able to find published default files for style.xml and colors.xml. However, I believe that the defaults for a style number are what you see in the style.xml and color.xml for the chart using that style (redundancy for backwards compatibility). So creating a new chart with a given style should produce style/color parts where the you can see the details
• I'm still researching your other question about why files saved in Office 2010 don't have style.xml and colors.xml parts and what the defaults are in that case. I will update you with what I find there.

Best,
-Mike