Learn how to enhance the appearance and clarity of your data visualizations by leveraging sheet- and object-level formatting options. This article explains how to adjust grid lines, shading, and color schemes to create visually effective Tableau dashboards.
Key Insights
- Users can format entire sheets, specific rows, or columns by right-clicking and choosing the format option, allowing customization of fonts, alignments, shading, borders, and grid lines.
- Applying color scales to measures such as sales enables gradient-based visual differentiation, where darker or lighter shades reflect higher or lower values respectively; categorical dimensions, however, use discrete color palettes with a limit of around 20 distinct colors.
- Noble Desktop highlights that the color picker behavior varies by operating system, with Mac and Windows users accessing different interfaces, which can affect how colors are selected and applied in visualizations.
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I'll just mention again that when you go into the formatting sidebar, you can do more than just formatting fields. You can format the entire sheet, the rows in the sheet, and the columns in the sheet. And every time you click a button, you can choose what you're formatting.
This gives you general formatting over the sheet. So again, there is no tab here to just automatically display a sheet, I mean display the sidebar for format. If you right click anywhere and choose format, that now brings it into play.
Now I can format the font for the sheet. I can format alignment, shading, borders, and lines. For instance, if I want to play around with the grid lines, I have none right now.
I'll click here. I'll choose a dark grid line. Maybe I can change the color.
Now I can start playing around with grid lines on the sheet. I can do rows and columns. Maybe I don't want to do grid lines for the entire sheet, so I'll choose none.
I'll choose rows and add grid lines for that. I'll make that dark. Very good.
Maybe I don't want the color to be blue. I'll make it black. Depending on the type of information, maybe you're doing a bar chart, and you're going to say none for the rows for the grid lines, but for columns, you want to create vertical lines.
Well, for bar charts, you want to create vertical lines that measure the amount of values horizontally. I'm going to go back and choose none. Shading, we covered this as well.
By default, if I go to the sheet, I can choose a color to add shading to the background of the sheet. This is where you'll spend a lot of time making adjustments to get your report to look just right, and so you have a whole bunch of options here. I'm going to go back and choose none.
All right. I can format the title. Again, you right-click on an object and choose format.
This is now for formatting just the title. All right. I'm going to close that.
We talked about color. I'll briefly talk about color one more time. The color picker that you're going to get when you're working with dimensions versus measures is different.
If I add in sales into color, I'll have the color of these bars be determined by the value of sales. Now, the darker the color, the higher the amount. The lighter the color, the lower the amount.
When I click this and choose edit colors, I get a gradient. In here, I can choose a whole different color scheme. Maybe I prefer green.
I'll click okay. I'll apply just to see what it looks like, and it does that. I can choose red, green, diverging.
I'll choose that when I click apply. Again, green amounts are higher. Red amounts are lower.
The redder, so it's just like color scales in conditional formatting. That's what you're going to get if you're working with this type of chart. I'm going to go back and choose automatic.
I'll click okay. It goes back to automatic. If I take out sales, it's just a solid color.
When I click color now, it's only solid colors that I'm working with. There's no gradient. There's just one color.
When you add a measure to the color, then you get gradients. The difference is for the pie chart, I'm just going to undo this and then go back to this. If I want to play around with the color, I've already chosen person for color.
When I click color in this case and choose edit colors, I'm not going to get a gradient. I'm going to get boxes. The bad news about this is any palette you choose will give you about 20 or so colors, not any more than that.
If you have more values than 20, you'll start repeating colors. The color picker is dependent on your operating system. If you're on Windows, you'll get a Windows color picker.
If you're on a Mac, you'll get a Mac color picker. I think we talked about the marks card, so I'll continue. I'm looking to get to my next topic, and then we'll talk about showing multiple years.
Okay, access edit, we talked about this. Minor ticks, 25,000,5,000. We did something like this with the electrical.