I feel unable to judge without seeing the actual table.
this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2026
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Pastels: could be tasteful
Neon: what happened to your eyes?
Yeah.
I usually colour code tables to draw attention to key areas.
I do it all the time at work as an engineer. Red/bold for bad numbers, green/bold for good numbers. Maybe orange/bold for mixed bag
Red/green isn't really a good combination due to color blindness. Either go blue/orange or at least add icons like ↑ and ↓ next to it.
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Yeah. My conditional formatting makes some of my Excel tables look like I'm defragging my harddrive.
Here is a colored chart of all my favorite colors:
Why do you hate UV and infrared?
I'm not a shrimp 🤷♂️
Sounds like something someone who doesn't want tonget eaten would say.
You don’t see them?
Where are my dark colors? I wanna be broody and edgy
Why do you hate brown? Pastel colors?
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The APA table I imagined.
Well, rainbow tables are really valuable in certain disciplines, just not those rainbow tables
What if they’re rainbow coloured rainbow tables? (The thought that someone would print out rainbow tables for their thesis is slightly amusing)
Well, for when you're 300 pages short and you add an appendix...
Seeing "Why!" makes my brain angry lol
Why, land sakes! What has your jimmies rustled?
A friend once revived an email riddled with misspellings and grammatical errors from her boss that critiqued her (appropriate) use of exclamation points. Specifically, that appearing cheerful was not professional.
Some people just like to be miserable.
The most competent white collar workers I know use exclamation points to the near exclusion of all other pronunciation. This is wild
I've only ever been academia adjacent and I'm glad. Some of the most soulless people I've ever met. It's the lab grunts who know how to party. Until they have the life sucked out of them to meet some arbitrary writing spec for a journal
Not using colors in scientific writing is discarding a valuable information channel and therefore inefficient. When you are already limited in the allowed word count, this can speed up conveying information and reduce cognitive strain on readers (and possibly yourself). So it's a win-win.
This should not end in chaos though, where colours are more confusing than helpful.
The times when we had to print out each and every single page on a crappy black/white office printer are luckily becoming more and more a thing of the past. So even this is no longer a good reason to not use colours.
Be sure to be careful and thoughtful in your color palette though because if colors are important to the understanding of information then it should be accessible.
There's nothing wrong with rainbow tables. Printing them sounds a bit excessive, though.
Faith, what are you doing? Rainbow Tables are for the CS class!
I’m beginning to think Faith shouldn’t have chosen higher education.
Because it can't accept her avant garde use of color to facilitate learning? Because Faith is ahead of her time? Because she is a pioneer?
What is her crime? Enjoying a table? A colorful, rainbow table?
This is education manifest!
Did the colors in question lack adequate succulency?
I have full faith in her. Faith did nothing wrong!
Faith in Faith
I do think a rainbow table would be welcome in Elementary Ed
Haven't been able to locate the definitive source, but there are several of these out there with Faith and Professor Kutaywa.
Believe it originates somewhere on LinkedIn, but very rare for a LinkedIn meme to escape the platform.
I understand that colors can color, heh, our perceptions but being a primarily visual animal means that we can digest information much quicker through color.
Without seeing the charts, I can’t say if the Prof is just being a curmudgeon or not.
According to the APA website, it’s more about accessibility and the cost of printing color vs grayscale
https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/tables-figures/colors
Clearly fake - no-one puts first supervisor in their email signature!
My masters thesis advisor would not let us use the word "that". In his defense, 90%+ of the time, it's useless filler and can be left out
*that can be left out
You’d hope a professor would understand capitalisation. I know in real life that many don’t though.
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Context, nao.
the context is all there ... Faith is a graduate student working on their masters thesis, in the thesis paper they included tables that they presumably color-coded (maybe different columns had different colors), and they used multiple colors such that it was "rainbow colored".
Apparently the thesis advisor did not like the presence of color and advises using APA guidelines on how to style & format the tables: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/tables-figures/tables
Interestingly your link doesn't mention use of color or lack there of. It does say elsewhere that you shouldn't do it for decoration, though.
That said, things like this are more dictated by the journal you publish to and a thesis has to imitate that. Solution? Graduate and start a journal that requires beautiful color tables, lol
yeah, I think the email is probably fake and made for internet points / humor
I have heard horror stories about how specific formatting has to be for a thesis or dissertation, though - and often those rules are very specific to a particular university or even department. So it's also possible for rules like that to be local and not from a universal standard like the APA guide.
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God forbid women have hobbies.
Ah the heady experience of a virgin clown-sighting. We all remember. Bring on the rainbows, Little Bobby Tables.
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