The Importance of Expression
As data consultants, one of our key responsibilities is to deliver dashboards that not only provide actionable insights but also resonate with each client’s unique identity. A generic dashboard may get the job done, but a truly impactful dashboard should reflect the client’s brand, values, and vision. By leveraging custom company colours and incorporating meaningful shapes such as logos or industry-specific icons, we can create dashboards that feel authentic and tailored, instantly communicating to the client that this solution was built specifically for them. In this blog, I’ll walk through how to achieve this level of personalization in Tableau, with practical steps and some real use cases.
Why Custom Colours?
Colours are there for more than just aesthetics of your dashboard. They can also play an important role by being an instant visual cue for your company. Using your company’s colour palette helps your dashboard blend seamlessly with internal presentations, reports, and marketing material. It also makes the data feel “tailored and customized” increasing engagement from viewers. By default, Tableau offers a limited set of colour palettes, and you can’t freely use any hex code you want in all chart types. To overcome this limitation and ensure your exact company colours are available throughout your dashboards, you need to create a custom colour palette using the tableau Preferences XML file. This file can be found in your tableau repository. To find your tableau repository in your windows explorer, navigate to My Documents>My Tableau Repository>Preferences.tps
How to Create Custom Palette.
Right click on the Preferences.tps file>Open With> Notepad and here in the notepad you can define your own colour palettes via simple xml coding. If you already know your company’s or brand’s preferred colour codes, you can add them here in this file and save it in your Tableau repository. Here is a sample code for the colour palette I used for my data school application, feel free to adapt it to your needs.
<workbook>
<preferences>
<color-palette name=”Reds” type=”regular”>
<color>#da323f</color>
<color>#ffbeb2</color>
<color>#f05c4d</color>
<color>#fb9984</color>
<color>#ae123a</color>
</color-palette>
</preferences>
</workbook>
You need to enter the hex code of your chosen colour scheme between the <preferences> and </preferences>. Remember that a single colour palette cannot hold more than 20 colours in tableau. If you need multiple colour palettes you can add more by creating new colour palettes between the preferences tags.
Tip: If you are unsure where to go to get custom colour codes for your work, I highly recommend this site: https://coolors.co/ Which is a colour palette generator site which can aid you in picking the optimal colour schemes.
Once you have saved your tps file, restart tableau and your palette will appear in the colour picker menu under the name you gave it.
Why Use Custom Shapes?
Shapes are a great way to add context and personality to your data points. Instead of generic circles or squares, imagine showing the company’s logo for each store location, or an icon representing product categories in a scatter plot, or even in the case of visualizing nearby competitors on a map you can utilize company logos to make it clear where stores are within an area. It makes your dashboard not only visually distinct but also helps users interpret data faster. These are niche use cases, but definitely a valuable addition to your toolkit for enhancing your visualisations.
How to Add Custom Shapes:
Similar to colours you cannot just import your company’s logo or custom icons directly into tableau. The way to go about this is again within Tableau Repository In here you can create a new folder and add your custom company logos or icons for use in tableau visualisations. The best file format is either a PNG or SVG for your icons/logos. Place them in a new folder inside your Tableau “Shapes” directory (My Documents > My Tableau Repository > Shapes >NewFolderName
