Product Consultant extraordinaire Dan Huff introduced me to an interesting wrinkle involving Tableau Data Server, and I just have to pass it on.
Scenario:
- You create a custom color palette for your company
- You want to automatically associate this palette with certain dimensions and the values they contain
- You don’t particularly feel like dropping a modified .tps file on each and every desktop in your organization
Answer? Use Data Server!
- Create your custom color palettes using the technique described in Creating Custom Color Palettes
- On the single machine with the palettes are installed, choose to associate them with a dimension in your data source.
- Map values to colors the way you normally do
- Publish your data source to Tableau
- Moving forward, your report authors will use the Data Server data source.
Note how my local TPS file is empty? It shows no custom color palettes.
…but that doesn’t matter, because the palette is safely stored in the data source itself!
Below I’ve created a simple chart which uses Department and the palette “just works”. Even in a brand-new, empty workbook Tableau is using the colors I chose earlier automatically:
The interesting thing to note is that the palette will NOT show up in the Edit Colors dialog at this point:
Thank you Dan!
