Expenses graph confusing
I'm finding the expenses graph to be confusing and difficult to read. I've attached a screenshot.
The settings I currently have for this are Group By Month, and Stacked. The problems I see are:
* I'm grouped by month, but the horizontal axis looks to broken up by week. This makes it confusing to find where the actual relevant points are.
* The stacked lines add a lot of noise here. Something is going wrong with this where I'm seeing gaps between the stacks. This would be *much* more clear if it were a stacked bar graph.
* Some of the colors are not very distinct. The two purples are very close together in tone & shade, it's hard to tell them apart, as are the two blues and the yellow/peach colors.
Moneydance_expenses_graph_confusing.png
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1 Posted by sth on Apr 08, 2025 @ 07:44 PM
You can set custom graph colors in the settings->Appearance Tab.
The colors are listed top to bottom in the legend to clarify them.
Though the axis has weekly labels, the data points are monthly and the total of the previous month.
That being said, I would prefer a city scape graph myself for this making the binning clear and getting rid of the visual clutter of going to zero at the ends of the plot.
All it all, I agree, the graphing package used is missing a lot of features.
2 Posted by erik on Apr 08, 2025 @ 08:20 PM
Yeah I see that the data points are monthly, but my chief complaints are about the visual noise added by the extra horizontal axis labels and the stacked line graph is just really a mess. Can we get a feature request into the developers to improve this?
Thanks for the tip about graph colors. But I'm not seeing where to set them. I've looked in a few places
* Clicking the Settings button at the top right of the Expenses graph - There is no Appearance tab, or tabs of any sort here.
* Right click the Pie Chart -> Properties -> There's an Appeance tab here, I can set outline and background colors but no way to set graph colors.
* Right click the legend -> Properties -> same thing as the pie chart.
* Right click the line chart -> Properties -> There are more options here, include Plot -> Appearance but the only colors I can select are outline and background.
3 Posted by sth on Apr 08, 2025 @ 09:37 PM
Go to settings for MD. Click the appearance tab. Then customize the theme.
Look for "Graph data set XX" where XX is 1 through 23 and set them. This will be the color sequence then for all graphs.
4 Posted by erik on Apr 08, 2025 @ 11:27 PM
OK I see. This is disabled for the Flat Dark theme, which is the theme I've been using. I tried Solarized Dark, which allows me to customize the graph colors but it's otherwise pretty bad, with menu bars and tabs showing up bright white.
It seems like a bug that it's not possible to change the graph colors when using the Flat Dark theme. That's the only theme where the customize button is disabled for some reason.
5 Posted by dwg on Apr 08, 2025 @ 11:38 PM
The Flat Dark is a fixed theme.
Many years ago it was found that this theme did not behave well when you changed colours, the only solution was to make it a fixed theme. It people want to make a customised Dark Theme then Solarized Dark should be used as the base.
6 Posted by erik on Apr 09, 2025 @ 12:14 AM
Solarized Dark has some problems though:
The menu bar has a white background. Buttons, tabs, comboboxes, checkboxes don't fit with a dark theme. I don't see anything in the theme customizer to fix these things either.
Couldn't you just fix the dark theme? Or make one just like it that doesn't have the issue you're describing?
System closed this discussion on Jul 09, 2025 @ 12:20 AM.