Bullet chart color rule

verytiredgirl

I have a bullet chart showing Sales, COGS, GM and it's corresponding Budget Amount

As you can see, Sales and Cogs are over the budget, and I want to show the bar color to green. Whereas GM is lower than the Budget, I want to show the GM bar to be grey.

How do I achieve this with color rules?

ArborRose

Set a formula based on budget_type with something comparing actual performance against budget.

CASE 

  WHEN `Actual Amount` >= `Budget Amount` THEN 'Green'

  WHEN `Actual Amount` < `Budget Amount` THEN 'Grey'

  ELSE 'Blue' -- Optional default color if you need one

END

Then go to chart properties > color rules and map colors to your formula.

verytiredgirl

I created a BeastMode follow your instruction and set the color rule like this

However, the chart stay the same, no color rule were applied.

ArborRose

How about I try explaining this way. Apologies as I make up some quick sample data. I'm going to use quantity, price, calculated total, and a budget per order.

Let's assume this is my data:

OrderID	Product	Budget_Type	Quantity	Price	OrderDate	Budget
1001	Widget A	Sales	5	25.0	2025-01-15	80
1002	Widget B	COGs	2	50.0	2025-01-16	90
1003	Widget A	Sales	1	25.0	2025-01-17	35
1004	Widget C	GM	10	75.0	2025-01-18	600
1005	Widget B	COGs	3	50.0	2025-01-19	160
1006	Widget A	Sales	7	25.0	2025-01-20	200
1007	Widget C	GM	4	75.0	2025-01-21	250

And this is my color rule:

If I do a table chart, it might look like this

And using that same dataset and changing it to a horizonal bar:

In this example my color rules are

DavidChurchman

ArborRose's approach works on most card types, but not on the Bullet Chart. For whatever reason, Bullets won't accept color rules like this. If I were to guess why, it's that the philosophy behind a Bullet Chart is to show progress against targets using the relationship between the bar and the target marker, so a color would be redundant, but it is limiting.

If you want a pop of color when you meet/don't meet the target, you could use unicode characters in a tool tip (hat tip to ArborRose's fake data):

Case
when Price* Quantity >= Budget then '🔵'
when Price* Quantity < Budget then '❌'
END

You can see this highlights a second annoying limitation of Bullets in Domo, in that you can't control what the data labels appear on (Actual Value vs. Target vs. everything), so you end up with redundant marks on the graph.

If you're willing to ditch the Bullet (I usually do!) another approach is using the Symbol + Stacked Bar:

To achieve that, I broke up Total into Total (over budget) and Total (under budget):

If you used the Symbol + graph, make sure to check the option to "Sync Value Scale" in the general properties, which is off by default.

And to go even farther from your original request, IMO changing the color of the whole bar can be a bit busy. You could take a similar approach, but color-code the budget icon instead, giving you more control over what draws attention on the chart:

ArborRose

Wow, that's a really clever approach @DavidChurchman. I did not catch that it was a bullet chart vs a horizonal bar.

ArborRose

@DavidChurchman - I really like this trick. How about maybe point up or down based on budget?

• Up arrow: ↑ (Unicode: U+2191)

• Down arrow: ↓ (Unicode: U+2193)

• Up-pointing triangle: ▲ (Unicode: U+25B2)

• Down-pointing triangle: ▼ (Unicode: U+25BC)

DavidChurchman

@ArborRose Yeah, with arrows like that, you could also make your target 100% transparent and just use the data label as the target (centered data-label from tool-tip, symbols-only data-label):

Case
when Price* Quantity >= Budget then '🔹'
when Price* Quantity < Budget then '🔻'
END