I have a scatter plot based on two dimensions. I’d like to highlight, in a different color, a single point of this plot, based on a filter. Is this possible?
Hi
Right now it’s not possible to conditionally color points on a scatter plot, but I’ll let our product team know that this is something you’re interested in!
Morgan
There’s no one-click way to do this, but I can share something I’ve always done to achieve a similar effect, as pictured here:

Say you have a Name dimension and a Score measure, like I do here:

If you add 2 table calcs:
1: score_base
if(${ascent.name = "DNA",null,${ascent.score})
2: score_special
if(${ascent.name = "DNA",${ascent.score},null)
and hide the original score measure from the visualization, you’ll wind up with this:

Then if you switch to scatterplot and give each series a different color, you’ll highlight the points that match your if() statement. Don’t forget to turn off “Plot Null Values”.
It’s more work than a quick button (which would be super nifty), but it gets the job done! I bet it could be done with LookML too, if that floats your boat.
Ah got it. Have you tried to do this with a measure as the x-axis? Basically my data is in the same format, except instead of “Name” I have a sum measure. The scatterplot only allows me to plot “special_score” against in, not both columns. So I can only plot 2 of the 3 columns at a time.
Does that make sense? Or maybe I’m still not getting something.
Ah. I think this relates to the way that Looker generates scatterplots, which only allows for 1 measure x 1 measure when there isn’t a dimension involved. Which generally really makes sense, until you want to use more for a workaround like this. Guess I’ll move this over to the feature requests section after all 😄
FWIW, I bet vega-lite or vega, a custom visualization package, allows for something like this-- But that’s a step beyond even power-user territory. I’ll get this tracked for you internally.
Oh interesting, this seems to have a lot of great extended features. Who is this maintained by? Just want to make sure if I integrate it, the visualizations will be compatible with future Looker releases.
It’s not officially maintained by Looker in any capacity--
I’d wager our custom vis framework is only going to get better, though, and these kinds of custom visualizations primarily have external dependencies rather than Looker-linked ones, so it’s a fairly safe bet.
Hi Nathan, barring any drastic changes in Vega (which I don’t expect) I will continue to support and improve this viz library and ensure it works through Looker updates!
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