BI Color And Formatting Standards Guide

## CONTEXT
You are helping me define formatting and color standards for my BI dashboards so they are consistent, accessible, and easy to read across the whole organization. I want concrete rules for color meaning, number formatting, conditional highlighting, and layout consistency for a 2026 tool such as Power BI, Tableau, Looker, or Metabase. This is a design-standards task, not coding. Today every dashboard looks different, color is used decoratively rather than meaningfully, and number formats are inconsistent, which makes comparisons confusing and occasionally misleading, so I want a short, enforceable standard people will actually follow and that a reusable template can bake in. I also want the standard written so a non-designer on the team can apply it correctly, because the goal is consistency across everyone who builds dashboards, not just the few people with a design eye.

## ROLE
Act as a BI design lead who has standardized dashboards across organizations and knows that less is more. You make color carry meaning rather than decoration, you enforce accessible contrast and colorblind-safe palettes, and you keep number formatting consistent so comparisons are never accidentally misleading. You keep the standard short enough that teams actually adopt it and you provide a template that makes following it the path of least resistance.

## RESPONSE GUIDELINES
- Provide concrete, reusable rules rather than vague principles.
- Make every color choice carry a defined, documented meaning.
- Prioritize accessibility and colorblind-safe palettes throughout.
- Keep the standard short enough that people will follow it.
- Provide a reusable template that bakes in the standard.
- Show good and bad examples so the rules are unmistakable.

## TASK CRITERIA

### Define Color Meaning
- Assign fixed meanings to good, bad, and neutral colors.
- Use a single accent color for emphasis rather than a rainbow.
- Reserve red strictly for negative or alerting states.
- Keep brand colors out of data-encoding roles where they confuse meaning.
- Document the palette so everyone uses the same hues.
- Define a neutral default so unimportant elements recede.

### Ensure Accessibility
- Meet contrast ratios for text and for key chart elements.
- Use colorblind-safe palettes for categorical encodings.
- Pair color with shape or label so color is never the only cue.
- Test charts in grayscale to confirm they still read.
- Avoid red-green pairings that fail for common color vision deficiencies.
- Limit the number of distinct categorical colors per chart.

### Standardize Numbers
- Set consistent decimal places per metric type.
- Define formats for currency, percentages, and large numbers.
- Use thousands separators and abbreviations consistently.
- Align number formatting across every dashboard.
- Specify how nulls and zeros are displayed.
- Define how negative numbers are shown.

### Apply Conditional Formatting
- Define thresholds for highlighting out-of-band values.
- Use consistent up and down indicators for deltas.
- Avoid overusing highlights, which dilutes their meaning.
- Keep heatmap color scales consistent across views.
- Reserve bold emphasis for genuinely important values.
- Anchor color scales to fixed ranges so views stay comparable.

### Enforce Layout Consistency
- Standardize the placement of titles, subtitles, and footnotes.
- Set consistent spacing, fonts, and chart sizing.
- Define where filters and data-freshness information appear.
- Provide a reusable template to enforce the standard.
- Specify a consistent grid so dashboards feel like a family.
- Standardize how axis labels and legends are presented.

## ASK THE USER FOR
- Your BI tool and any brand color requirements.
- The metric types you display most often.
- Any accessibility requirements you must meet.
- Examples of current dashboards to align to the standard.
- Whether a shared template already exists to build on.