Color is tremendously powerful in creating data visualizations.

Tableau allows you to create custom color palettes. And usually people do this by:

1. Find an image with the colors you want to use
2. Use an eyedropper color picker tool; select each color in the image.
3. Get the color code.
4. Open your preferences.tps file and write a line of XML by hand that includes the color code.
5. Repeat for each color.

But that’s old-school. One of my colleagues created a web app that automatically creates custom Tableau color palettes from any image.

1. Find the URL of an image with the colors you want to use
2. Paste it into http://www.tabpal.co/

Tabpal identifies the dominant colors and spits out custom palette information ready to add to your Tableau prefs. Done!

For example, say I wanted to make a viz about the history of Apple, using the color scheme of Apple’s old rainbow apple logo.

Apple’s original rainbow logo, from Apple2History.org.

I fed it to TabPal. Here’s what I get:

TabPal grabs the top five colors in the image, identifies them, and creates the color-palette XML I need.

But, we’re not quite done yet. The Apple rainbow has six colors, so I used a web color picker (I like Colorzilla) to identify the blue color’s hex code — it’s #118ECE — and added it to the list TabPal generated, then added it to my Tableau preferences file.

Now I can make my Apple viz in six colors. Moof!

Interested in learning more? Check out this webinar on Best Practices for Using Color in Data Visualization by Tableau Research Scientist Maureen Stone. She’s wicked smart!

I like to listen to music while I’m working.

In fact, I like to listen to music all the time.

Especially good music.

Here’s some:

For anyone interested, I put together a 6+ hours Spotify (yeah yeah) playlist of my favorite tracks from 2014 (and still working on it).
posted by Lutoslawski at 1:06 PM on December 12 [4 favorites]

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NPR Music has put together a massive playlist of their best of 2014, Songs We Love.

That link above launches the groovy in-browser app, which lets you listen on shuffle, choose a genre, and gives you artist info, as well as other functionality. You can view the entire list here if you are more eye-curious than ear-curious.

In a somewhat complete Spotify playlist

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Do you have multiple versions of Tableau Desktop installed on your Mac?

You might be beta testing the new version, but still need to work with a current version for production work. Wish you could just right-click on a .twbx and choose on the fly which version to open it in?

Well, thanks to Mac OS X, it’s easy. No registry hacking required. (Note that this isn’t supported by Tableau — it’s a Mac OS X feature, so talk to your favorite Apple Genius if you need help.)

1. Install multiple versions of Tableau Desktop on your Mac. Go to the Applications folder and rename each one with its version so you can keep them straight.
   
2. Launch each version at least once. (During first run, Mac apps do things like register with the OS.)
3. Right-click a .twbx and select Open With > Other…
   
   
4. Check Always Open With and select the version you want to add, then click Open. (The checkbox seems to be necessary to make the option “stick” in the Open With menu. You can change the default version at any time by repeating this step.)
   
5. Now, you can right-click and have your choice of Tableau version available at your fingertips.
   

Enjoy! Post a comment if you have any questions and I’ll do my best to answer when I get a chance.

(If your question is, “how can I beta test the new version of Tableau?” the answer is, contact your Tableau account manager and they’ll be happy to sign you up!)