Tableau Desktop comes with many different colour palettes to choose from, but what if you could make your own? Here’s a quick guide on how to do just that.
Step 1: Choose your colour palette
Tableau defines 3 different palette types; regular, ordered-sequential and ordered-diverging. Before you can even pick your colours it’s important for you to know what palette type you want to create. If you're just after a random selection of colours for categorical colour go for regular. For quantitative palettes ordered-sequential and ordered-diverging (for negative and positive values) are what you're looking for.
Once you’ve determined the palette type, find out the hex codes for your colours. Here’s a great website for generating colour palettes https://coolors.co/
Step 2: Edit your Preferences.tps in the Tableau Repository
By default when installing Tableau Desktop your Tableau Repository folder is placed in ‘This PC -> ‘Documents’. Once you open the folder, right-click ‘Preferences.tps’, got to ‘Open with’ and select ‘Notepad’. An unedited preferences file should look something like this:
To add your new colour palette, type <preferences> followed by a new line and then </preferences> in between the workbook tags. Next, between these preferences tags enter your colour palette like so:
Next to ‘name=’ type the name of your colour palette in double quotation marks and next to ‘type=’ write the type of colour palette you wish to use in quotation marks as discussed in step 1.
Between the colour palette tags is where your hex codes will go. Each hex code should be wrapped between <color> and </color> (note colour needs to be spelt the American way or it won’t work).
Step 3: Save your palette and (re)open Tableau
Finally, save your Preferences.tps and close it. If you have Tableau open already there is no way to refresh the colour palettes other than closing Tableau and re-opening it (make sure to save your work if you need to do this). Open Tableau and go to a new sheet and you should now be able to see your new colour palette like so:
