Create a default Tableau Template - now with added 8.1 goodness

One of the things missing from Tableau are workbook themes or stylesheets. Although themes are listed there are only two and you cannot customise and save them to you liking. At #tcceu13 i asked Jock Mackinlay about this and he said he has a team of people looking into it.

Do you spend a long time getting a dashboard looking just right, maybe you have a company colour scheme that you have to adhere to.

Each time you have to create a new colour palate.

Tired of having to format your dashboard again and again each time?

Well good news, heres a way that you can create your template that you can create once and then re-use when ever you need to.

1. Create a new workbook with one sheet and one dashboard. Name them sheet Default Sheet and Default Dashboard.
2. If you always use the same datasource then connect to it, but if not just leave that blank.
3. Change the formatting of your sheet and dashboard to your liking. 
4. Set the default size of the dashboard , the background colours, the font sizing and colour any default titles you like, background images. Everything that you normally have to do again and again. 
5. If you want to set up some custom palettes for the colour shelf then follow the instructions here http://wannabedatarockstar.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/colour-me-right.html
6. Now save your workbook to something like Tableau_template. If you are going to make several different ones then name them something sensible. 
7. Here's the really important crucial bit. Find the workbook you have created and right click, select properties and set it to read only. This is the magic bit. 

Next time you have to make a dashboard, simply load up the Template dashboard, connect to your data. Make sure that you make a copy of the sheet and dashboard, don't use the create new button or you will not have the formatting set. By copying the defaults it means you can have multiple sheets and dashboards. Then create the viz and as you build it all of the formatting that you just set-up will be in place. By making the workbook read only you are prompted to save it with a different name, which means you can use the same template again and again. 

Hopefully in the near future this will be part of Tableau, but in the meantime this works really nicely.

Need more info? then tweet me @Matt_Francis

Post Tableau 8.1 Update

One of the things that Tableau lacks, even with shiny new 8.1 is Templates. I wrote a previous post about a method for creating a template sheet and dashboard, saving the workbook as a read only file and then using that as a starting point for all your work.

However this relies on you remembering to open that template workbook in the first place. Now with 8.1 you can copy and past both sheets, but now dashboards between open workbooks.

So now we can use this with out templates in the following way. 

1. Create a workbook with loads of sheets and dashboards, all formated in ways that you like to use eg, light pallete, dark pallete etc,2x2 layout 2x3 layout etc

2. Save this and set it read-only just in case.

3. Now next time you create a viz and when you am ready to create a dashboard from it, you load up the template workbook, select the dashboard layout you want to use, and copy and paste it into the new workbook. The carries all the formatting over so all you have to do it add in the sheets and publish! No mess, no fuss.

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