Quick Tip: Create and use custom color palettes in Tableau

Looking to speed up your dashboard development and add a personal touch to your dashboards? I’ve got a quick and easy tip for you. Make your own custom color palettes! Tableau Desktop allows you to modify the preferences file (found under My Tableau Repository and named Preferences.tps). You can open this file and modify its code to set up your own color palettes. Check out Tableau’s great documentation on how to set up these palettes here: https://help.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/formatting_create_custom_colors.htm

You can set up categorical, sequential, and diverging palettes to fit any type of dimension or measure you’re looking to add a specific color to.

This will take forever to set up a custom palette, how can I do this faster?

I’m glad you asked! If you have your color palette defined, skip this section. Otherwise, check out two awesome tools that help you generate Tableau tps files with custom palettes. These generators can take images, have predefined palettes, or allow you to build the palette one by one. Just keep in mind, there is a limit of 20 colors on a palette as of 2020.3.

• Color by Toan Hoang of Tableau Magic
  • https://color.tableaumagic.com/
• Color Tool for Tableau by Interworks
  • https://colortool.powertoolsfortableau.com/

All you’ve gotta do is download the generated tps file, replace your existing one in your “My Tableau Repository” (just make sure you don’t have any existing customizations in there).

Bonus tip: Set the default palette to dimensions or measures in the data pane.

For both dimensions and measures, you can set the default colors for each field so you don’t have to reconfigure it on each worksheet. By right-clicking on the field, you can go to the default properties and select “Color”. Check out the short GIF I created below to see that process.

That’s it, hope you enjoyed the post!

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