Creating custom colour palettes in Tableau from the command-line

Most of the time Tableau's in-built colour palettes are more than suitable for the visualisation you're creating. That said, I also quite like to create my own custom colour palettes and sometimes a manager might ask that you use your company's official brand colours.

Unfortunately in order to create custom colour palettes in Tableau you have to find your Preferences.tsp file and then edit the XML:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<workbook>

<preferences>

<color-palette name="Forest" type="ordered-sequential">
<color>#132a13</color>
<color>#4f772d</color>
<color>#90a955</color>
</color-palette></preferences>
</workbook>

While this might be fine as a one-off, it gets unyieldy if you're constantly having to edit the XML to add or remove colours/palettes.

So I decided to create a command-line app to make it easier and quicker to manage your custom colour palettes in Tableau.

Introducing tab-pal:

tab-pal will automatically search for your Preferences.tsp file and prompt you for the path to it if it can't be found.

Alternatively, and what is recommended, is to create an enviromental variable called TAB_PAL_FILE, which tab-pal will search for on launch. This will ensure you don't need to keep supplying the file path every time you launch tab-pal.

You can install via pip (although I recommend pipx so you use it regardless of which virtual environment is or isn't activated).

Here is the Github repository.