---
title: "Highlights on the organisation chart"
description: "A highlight is a colour with a rule behind it. It paints the roles and circles that match and pushes the rest into the background, but only once you apply a view that contains it."
category: structure-governance
section: chart-and-circles
type: Reference
lastUpdated: 2026-08-05
locale: en
canonical: https://support.talkspirit.com/en/structure-governance/understanding-highlights
---

# Highlights on the organisation chart


## Highlights on the organisation chart

A highlight is a colour with a rule behind it. Every role and circle the rule matches takes that colour on your organisation chart, and everything else steps back, so the matches read at a glance. Talkspirit ships a catalogue of highlights, and your administrators can add more built on your own role and circle fields.

One thing catches most people out: a highlight colours nothing on its own. Colour appears only once you apply a **view**, which is a saved set of highlights. Until you pick one, the chart stays in its usual colours, however many highlights your administrators have written.

If your organisation has renamed circles and roles under Administration > Terminology, read your own words for them throughout.

## Is it a highlight or a view?

Two different objects, and the confusion starts with the chart's **Highlight** button, because it opens the second one.

| | What it is | Where you meet it |
|---|---|---|
| **Highlight** | One rule, one colour, one name: Vacant, Hiring, Legal, Changed this month | Talkspirit's catalogue, plus the ones your administrators write under **Structure settings > Visualisation > Highlight** |
| **View** | A named set of highlights, saved so you can switch them on together | The **Highlight** menu at the top right of **Explore organisation** |

To switch highlights on, open **Explore organisation**, click **Highlight**, and click a view in the list. Every highlight in that view takes effect at once, and a legend appears naming them. Click a line in the legend to hide or show that one colour, and click the view again to switch the whole thing off. Building and sharing views is covered in [Managing chart custom views](/structure-governance/how-to-manage-chart-custom-views).

A highlight can sit in as many views as you like. Its colour belongs to the highlight and not to the view, so changing it while you edit one view changes it everywhere that highlight appears, for everyone. Deleting a highlight takes it out of every view that used it, and Talkspirit tells you how many are affected before you confirm.

## What a highlight does to the chart

Each of the three chart views draws the same match differently.

- **Circles & roles**: a matching role is filled with the highlight colour, and a matching circle takes a pale tint of it. Roles that match nothing give up their usual fill for a neutral grey. Circles that match nothing keep their normal colour.
- **Hierarchy**: a matching card carries the colour as a bar down its left edge, and cards that match nothing fade into the background.
- **Network**: a matching node is filled solid with the colour, and a node that matches nothing is hollowed out to the page colour with only a pale outline left.

A role or circle that matches several highlights at once is drawn in diagonal stripes of each of their colours, rather than picking one.

So a highlight always does two things at once: it colours what matches, and it pushes back what does not. That is what separates it from the chart's search box, which dims what does not match but never adds any colour of its own.

## Which one wins, the filter or the colour?

**Filter**, the search box and **Highlight** all change what stands out, and they do not combine the same way in every view.

In **Circles & roles**, a filter or a search term takes over: while either is in use the highlight colours step aside, and they come back the moment you clear it. In **Hierarchy** and **Network** the two are combined instead, so only what matches your filter and carries a highlight colour stays lit.

## Where highlights come from

Two sources sit side by side in the **Add highlight** menu when you build a view.

- **Talkspirit's catalogue** covers your own roles and circles, four statuses (Vacant, Hiring, Core and Transversal), four windows of recent activity, and four thresholds of allocated time. These are the same in every organisation, and their rules cannot be rewritten.
- **My organisation** holds the highlights your own administrators have written. A rule there can test any role or circle field: name, purpose, domains, accountabilities, when it was created or last changed, whether a role is vacant, hiring, a core role or a cross-circle role, and any custom field your organisation has added.

Everyone in your organisation sees the same catalogue and the same organisation highlights. What differs is which of them you have saved into a view and switched on, and that choice affects nobody's chart but your own.

## What's Next?

- [Managing chart custom views](/structure-governance/how-to-manage-chart-custom-views)
- [Managing chart highlights as an administrator](/structure-governance/manage-highlights-as-an-admin)
- [Navigating your organisation chart](/structure-governance/how-to-navigate-your-chart)