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Color (or lack of) options
Posted February 15th, 2008 by Dan Gerena
I work with folks who are color blind, and rather than preparing analyses that use different shades of black/grey, would there be a way for you to add shading options similar to Excel with diagonal hash lines, polka dot patterns, etc that would make a black/white stacked bar graph easily readable? I presume this would be useful for folks printing output on a black & white printer as well.
Comments
That's a great suggestion, thank you! I've passed your ideas along to our development team.
Outside of Excel do you have other examples of shading options that you really like? Feel free to post examples here.
Did you know that in Excel 2007 they removed patterned fills on charts?
So - in one swoop they stuffed things up for colour blind users and those of us who like/need to print in B+W.
(you can still use pattern fills using VBA macros, bizarrely, in 2007)
Having the ability to vary line width within a multi-line chart to emphasize one line would be helpful, as would the ability to create custom colors in a multi-line chart.
Hi Emma,
Thanks for the suggestion. You may want to check out the color legend highlighting feature that was added in Tableau v3.5. It's a good way to call attention to a single line in a view.
You can turn on legend highlighting mode using the highlight icon in the upper right corner of the color legend. Then select the member you want to highlight. All the other lines turn gray and the line for the selected member stays colored.
As for the custom colors, do you mean that you want to assign custom colors to the members in the color legend? You can modify the color legend by double-clicking on it. But yes, you are restricted to the color palettes that come with Tableau. If you don't have any field on the color shelf you can double-click the Color shelf and create a custom default color for all the marks in the view.
I think Emma is suggesting more than just custom colors. She's asking for fill patterns.
I would be happy with just being able to use the standard Windows color picker to choose colors. The existing gradients are shameful at best and the color chooser only allows you to select the hue.
Please see ANY Windows application for an example of the color picker. Please see Adobe Illustrator for an example of gradient control.