Manage Appearance
Managing Display Appearance
Present your data and links with pride...
Deliver interactive, data-rich, visual reports in Omniscope rather than dull, complex spreadsheets or static, presentation slides. Omniscope offers extensive options for branding your file, displaying advertising, focusing the end users' navigation options, and changing the layout, theme and colouring to match your organisation's standards for internal and external documents.
Commands affecting the display of a given file are found in the Main Toolbar Appearance menu. In this section, we will introduce only two of the most commonly-used sets of options; Branding and Views. The Appearance menu is fully documented in the Main Toolbar Appearance Menu commands section.
Appearance > Branding
{Omniscope Professional & Enterprise only} The Branding sub-menu provides options to configure either of two informational pop-up pages presented on opening and closing a given file. It also provides the option to change the corner logo display from 'Visokio' to a logo of your own (with a link back to your own page), and to display banner advertising images and links in your downloadable Omniscope files.
There are two informational pages you can configure:
- The Cover page opens (and closes) before any working displays or Report Pages.
- The Back page displays when the file is closed, and is useful for reminders, acknowledgements and providing contact details relating to the file.
The Add Corner logo, Add Web Services menu logo, and Set publisher link options enable data publishers to further brand their files. The Banner advert sub-menu enables publishers to add advertising images and links to their files to fully integrate with the commercial aspects of their business. For more information, see Appearance Menu and Advertising Options.
Note: The Help page and banner advertising displays are currently the same for the working display and all the Report Pages in the file, rather than configurable for each Report Page. This may change in future versions. To edit the file specific Help Page, see Help > Edit help page.
Configuring Information Pages
Clicking on the option to configure a Cover and Back informational page launches a Set Page dialog that accepts 5 inputs from you. The dialogs used to create the Cover and Back informational pages are both similar to the one shown below:
Note: Both information pages support some aspects of HTML text formatting, such as <b>, <i> etc.
Suggestion: Use 'hard' returns to wrap your text for readability. Click 'Preview appearance' and then re-size the window by introducing hard returns to define the size and shape of information page. Click 'Submit' and the size, shape and text-wrapping of the information page will be preserved.
Note: Informational pages behave differently to the Help Page, which does not require hard returns and can be re-sized directly in preview mode.
Appearance > Views
For any given data set, one or more of Omniscope's 14 different views may not be needed to best depict the data set and support user interaction. It may be that the data does not contain any fields (columns) useful to plot against other fields in the Graph View. Some files could have so many different unique Category values in different fields that the Tree View becomes slow to open and use. Whether for these or other reasons relating to simplifying the file, it is possible to hide selected views from the users' View Chooser menus by unticking the view on the list displayed under Appearance > Views:
Look and Feel and Themes
In addition to logos/background images and font selection, all the colours associated with an file can be managed using the options available under Appearance > Look and Feel. There is a library of pre-configured Themes you can test from Appearance >Themes. You can also create your own combination of corporate colours and save them as your own named Theme. More on managing Themes.
Learn more...
For a more complete discussion of all the available Appearance menu commands, see the Main Toolbar Appearance Menu commands.
Next section: Refreshing data
User Guide Top
Managing Themes
Creating & Managing Themes
Controlling colours and presentation across files
Themes are combinations of display settings you can change under Appearance > Look and feel. These settings control most of the visible aspects of each file, outside of the controls available within individual views. By default, a built-in Theme called Classic is used for every file. A menu of alternative pre-defined Themes is available under Appearance > Themes. You can see the different colouring effects by changing the Theme applied to the open file.
 Ice Blue |  Bordeaux |
 Forest |  Darth Vader |
Create a corporate Theme corresponding to your corporate colours and general style of presentation, using a combination of official logos, font settings and themes, which you can define using Appearance > Look and Feel. Once you are satisfied with all the settings, name and save your official theme and it will become a new option on your Appearance > Theme menu. You can also copy this customised theme to others in your organisation, so that the official corporate Theme is available in the Theme menu to everyone configuring files.
Customising, Saving, Exporting & Installing Themes
If you change any settings relative to the current Theme, the Theme selection drop down will show that the new altered Theme is not saved. Click Save to give a name to the newly-modified Theme and save it to your installation, from which it will be available for future use, and transferable in the form of an .XML file you can copy across machines.
The settings corresponding to the new Theme are saved in a local .XML file named {YourThemeName}.XML. Anyone who creates a new file from an existing file can use the same Theme, which is part of the file. However, anyone creating a new file will not have access to the custom corporate Theme unless it is first copied to their machine.
Currently, to make a Theme you have defined available to others, you need to find the file called {YourThemeName}.XML on your machine, send a copy of this file to others needing to originate (not view) files with his theme, and tell them the location on their machine to copy this file so that it will be available to them whenever they create a new Omniscope file.
The location to find/copy the .XML theme files varies by version of Omniscope and your version of Windows, as described below:
Omniscope version 2.4
Vista:
C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Visokio Omniscope\UserThemes
Windows XP:
C:\Program Files\Visokio Omniscope\UserThemes
Omniscope version 2.5
Windows Vista:
C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Visokio\Omniscope\UserThemes
Windows XP:
C:\Documents and Settings\admin\Local Settings\Application Data\Visokio\Omniscope\UserThemes
Revealing Hidden System Files
If your system is set to hide system-related files and folders, you may not see the above locations until you change this setting:
1. Open the folder options in Windows:
Windows XP:
Open menu START > Settings > Control Panel > Folder options
Windows Vista:
Open menu START > Control Panel > Appearance and Personalisation > Folder options
2. Click on the View tab and enable the option 'Show hidden files and folders'.
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