You may also notice at the very bottom that there is a Customize Colors… option. Selecting any of these alternatives changes the default colors applied in your Excel workbook.
In the left side of the Page Layout tab (and this applies to Excel 2010, 2013, and 2016 on PCs Macs are a little different and I explain this in a Note below), there is a Themes group, which, among others options, contains a Colors dropdown menu (the images here are all from Excel 2013). In case you don’t know, every modern version of Excel contains more than 50 alternative color palettes to the default Excel colors. In turn, I’ve taken Pablo’s color palettes (thanks again, Pablo!) and converted them into 150 files you can input into Excel for your own use. (In my opinion, Canva’s “Design School” provides some of the best beginner design work out there, which is why I’ve included them in my list of Design Resources.)Īt the beginning of this year, Pablo Sáenz de Tejada turned all of those color palettes into a free, downloadable text file you can use to input them into Tableau. For example, in two posts from Canva last year, they provided over 150 different color palettes derived from and photos and “ impactful websites”. Fortunately, there are lots of creative people out there willing to provide you with samples, or at least a start. For me, using those default colors suggests a level of laziness-that the creator couldn’t bother to consider alternative colors to better display the data or convey their argument.īut how do you choose alternative color palettes? If you’re not a designer (like me), this might seem an impossible task. Using color in some of the default tools such as Excel and Tableau will yield visualizations that look just like everything else. As Maureen Stone once famously wrote, “Color used poorly will obscure, muddle and confuse.” It can be used to make things seem drab or to make them “pop”. Color can be used to highlight and draw attention, but also to confuse. Choosing and implementing color palettes is a difficult task in visualizing data.
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