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Colour Marking

Octa lets you highlight cells, rows, and columns with colours, useful for flagging interesting values during exploration, marking rows that need attention, or grouping columns visually.

Colour marks in action

Available colours

Six colours: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple. They're chosen to remain readable in both light and dark themes.

Applying a mark

Right-click context menu

The fine-grained way, working on whatever you right-click:

  • Right-click a cell → Mark → pick a colour.
  • Right-click a row number → Mark → pick a colour.
  • Right-click a column header → Mark → pick a colour.

If the right-clicked target is already part of the current selection (multi-cell, multi-row, or multi-column), the chosen colour is applied to every selected item, following the same precedence as Ctrl+M. Click outside the selection first if you want to colour only the single right-clicked target.

Edit menu and shortcut

Edit → Mark (or the Mark keyboard shortcut, default Ctrl+M, remappable) applies a single colour to the whole current selection:

  • A row block → row mark.
  • A column block → column mark.
  • A multi-cell selection → cell marks.
  • A single cell → cell mark.

The colour used by the shortcut is set under Settings → Table → Default mark colour (Green by default). Change it there if you want Ctrl+M to default to Red, etc.

Toolbar Edit menu

The Edit → Mark submenu lets you pick the colour explicitly as well.

Clearing a mark

Right-click the marked cell / row / column → Clear Mark.

To clear every mark on the file at once, Edit → Clear All Marks.

Precedence

When the same cell is covered by overlapping marks, the precedence is:

cell mark > row mark > column mark

So a cell marked individually wins over the mark on its row, which wins over the mark on its column. This lets you broadly highlight a column and then override specific cells within it.

Undo / Redo

Colour marks are tracked by undo / redo. Ctrl+Z unmarks the last applied mark; Ctrl+Y re-applies.

See also