Today we're going to look at how you can customize the flowcharts within Oracle Tutor procedures, and how you can share those changes with other authors within your company.
Here is an image of a flowchart within a Tutor procedure with the default size and color scheme.

You may want to change the size of your flowcharts as your end-users might have larger screens or need larger fonts. To change the size and number of columns, navigate to Tutor Author > Author > Options > Flowcharts.

The default is to have 4 columns appear in each flowchart, but, if I change it to six, my end-users will see a denser flowchart.

This might be too dense for my end-users, so I will change it to 5 columns, and I will also deselect the option to have separate task boxes.

Now let's look at how to customize the colors. Within the Flowchart options dialog, there is a button labeled "Colors."

This brings up a dialog box of every object on a Tutor flowchart, and I can modify the color of each object, as well as the text within the object.

If I click on the background, the "page" object appears in the Item field, and now I can customize the color and the title text by selecting Select Fill Color and/or Select Text Color.

A dialog box with color choices appears.

If I select Define Custom Colors, I can make my selections even more precise.

Each time I change the color of an object, it appears in the selection screen. When the flowchart customization is finished, I can save my changes by naming the scheme.

Although the color scheme I have chosen is rather silly looking, perhaps I want others to give me their feedback and make changes as they wish. I can share the color scheme with them by copying the FCP.INI file in the Tutor\Author directory into the same directory on their systems.

If the other users have color schemes that they do not want to lose, they can copy the relevant lines from the FCP.INI file into their file.

If I flowchart my document with the new scheme, I can see how it looks within the document.

Sometimes just one or two changes to the default scheme are enough to customize the flowchart to your company's color palette. I have seen customers who have only changed the Start object to green and the End object to red, and I've seen another customer who changed every object to some variant of black and orange.

Experiment! And let us know how you have customized your flowcharts.

Mary R. Keane
Senior Development Director, Oracle Tutor