Custom Themes in Tableau 2025.1 - Step-by-Step Guide

0:00In Tableau 25.

0:011, custom themes are now available.

0:03Let me show you how they work.

0:05We're here in Tableau and I've just opened the standard Superstore demo workbook

0:10If I go to the bottom right hand side here, you'll see that in my sort of thumbnail preview, all of these have the same general standard theme.

0:19What I'm going to do is apply a custom theme on top of this.

0:22So let's go back out of this view by going back to the uh standard view that we get in Tableau.

0:26We'll go to format.

0:27and then we'll select import custom themes.

0:30Now these custom themes use something called a JSON file.

0:33A JSON file is a way of essentially putting information into a format that's easily understood

0:38by an application.

0:39In here I have something called Superstore Product Version 2.

0:43I'll go ahead and open that and then I get this option that asks me if I want to preserve the settings that were there before or if I just want to override everything in this workbook.

0:51I'll go ahead and select override.

0:53If I click that you'll see that the theme is applied to not just this tab.

0:57If I go back to my thumbnail view, it's applied right across.

1:00Now you're probably thinking no it's not, these thumbnails are still showing white.

1:03I need to refresh this page, just go ahead and do that, refresh all thumbnails, and you'll see all of the tabs have been updated with that custom theme.

1:11So

1:11There's probably a a ton of questions here.

1:13How far can you go with this theme system?

1:16What can you do?

1:16What can you change?

1:17And how exactly do you create these themes?

1:19Well, the clue was actually when I went to import the theme.

1:22If I go back to that option, you'll see under format

1:25I'm able to export a custom theme.

1:27So if you have a workbook that you've already designed, you can already go to that workbook and export the theme from that workbook.

1:34So if you've got a style template or something in your organization

1:37You can already use that to export the supported theme elements today.

1:41Now just to show you this feature works the other way around, I saved the default theme beforehand.

1:46So what I'm gonna do is now go ahead.

1:48import that original theme let's go ahead and select this one and that's the original one let's go ahead and override the existing sheet obviously everything goes back to vanilla and then if I go back to my thumbnail view and I refresh the thumbnails again

2:00you'll see that everything goes back to the standard setting.

2:03So this is a huge feature because it gets rid of probably one of the most time-consuming tasks when building Tableau dashboards and styling work

2:11Um essentially all of that styling can migrate over to your theme file.

2:15Now the next question you might ask is look what themes are supported?

2:18What elements can I style?

2:20So if I go back to my

2:22uh standard view here.

2:22I've actually loaded up the uh standard support page for this new feature and actually themes have existed inside of Tableau for a while.

2:29There's been something called a workbook

2:31theme that you can already use but that was something that was sort of quite archaic and no one ever really paid attention to it.

2:36It didn't really do what people wanted.

2:38And so that's what you can see documented here.

2:40If I scroll down a little bit further, you can see the suggested format for a theme file.

2:44You'll note that this is version one, so there's obviously going to be improvements to this feature over time.

2:48But here you'll get the elements supported with the custom themes.

2:52And something I'll call out from the beginning here is that this is the initial

2:56Now something that Tableau have done for quite some time, even before Salesforce acquired them, was they actually shipped feature over multiple releases.

3:02So this is the first release of this feature.

3:04What I expect is subsequent releases to continue to push the theme support to the point where you can import

3:10one theme and nearly all the styling inside of a workbook, maybe down to even charts, are able to be applied.

3:15So you can even have things like chart themes as well.

3:18And so if you go down the slifts, you'll see exactly what's supported, whether it's fonts, colors, uh the elements, the tooltips, the titles

3:26uh the headers, the legends, all of this seems to be mostly uh sort of focused around font and a few elements around colour as well.

3:33Those are sort of quite notable.

3:34But I'll leave this link to this page that shows you what you can do inside of the theme file in the description below.

3:41Now another thing you might wonder is now that we have these files as JSON files.

3:45It's now possible for third-party tools to be able to interact and play with this theme files.

3:50So it's going to be quite easy to have, let's say, a theme gallery where you can download and export themes.

3:55And that's exactly what the data viz have already done.

3:57If you go ahead

3:58to their website they have something called the custom theme generator and you can see here I imported the theme that I'd set up.

4:03If I actually go ahead and import the vanilla theme and apply it

4:07You'll see they have a nice way of visualizing uh that theme and that setup here.

4:10So actually it's actually not doing what I expected it to do because I think I overrode my theme file when I was saving it previously.

4:16So that's not an issue to do with this specific uh site.

4:19But what you can do, you can come here and you can see that

4:22Those individual elements and how you can set them up.

4:24You can change the color, for example, if I want to change the background, I can do that all here, export the theme, and now that's a really easy file that I can create.

4:32So there's essentially two ways of creating this.

4:33You can

4:34go to the JSON file and just edit it yourself.

4:36You can export them from Tableau.

4:38You can use a theme file like here and actually just so you know what that uh file looks like if I open up my JSON editor and we'll go ahead and open that file let's go ahead to my desktop

4:48And go to themes and let's open up this v2.

4:51You can see the exact attributes that are editable here.

4:53So let's just make sure this is fitting up on screen

4:55And you can see these are the elements here in a JSON file.

4:58So if you wanted to, you could sit and edit these a bit like you would with CSS if you're familiar with web development.

5:03But that's pretty much the feature in a nutshell.

5:06Themes

5:06Finally, finally inside of Tableau 25.

5:091.

5:10Go ahead and catch the link in my description to find the Tableau release navigator and of course check out the rest of this playlist to see what's new.

5:17Thanks for watching.

5:18I'll see you in the next one