In this episode I show you how to take a dull report, and make it more visually appealing by adding color. Color helps us take a complicated subject, and make it easy to understand at a glace. The tools that LibreOffice provides are very powerful and allow you a great deal of flexibility when formatting your reports. Used inconjunctionwith clipart, the techniques you learn in this episode will help you take your reports to the next level of polish.

What separates a good report from a bad one is not always the content. If you find it a struggle to clearly communicate the meaning of your data, try to add some color. People are busy, and who wants to spend valuable time deciphering a complicated report? Use color to establish relationships between numbers, highlight what is important, or create a consistent style. Experiment, and let me know how your creations turn out!

This episode originally included a part about basic color theory. I cut that out in the interest of time, but if you are interested there are a lot of resources available online. http://www.worqx.com/color/is a good introduction. Spending a little time to learn the basics of color theory can help you make more informed decisions about how you format documents, and why negative numbers are so often shown in red.