Colours can be very effective in highlighting the relative performance of pupils. But colours can take a while to get right especially if you are new to assessment manager. Don't worry, in this set of lectures we start slowly and then make the examples more complex.

Tips and Advice

If you have marksheets that use a lot of NITE (nested if then else) formulas then here are my tips for effective use of colours:

• Don't use too many colours. Three to five colours are fine, but more colours are unlikely to make the data trends easier to see. In fact they can make data trends more difficult to identify.
• For the same reason, be careful when using the same colour to indicate different things.
• Get senior staff to agree the colours BEFORE you roll out a system for the whole key stage. It takes ages to amend every NITE statement.
• Use the 'clone from' option whenever you can!