Unlocking Reusability: The Power of Tableau Preferences Templates

Consistency is what we all strive for and it’s even more important in data viz deliverables.  Most firms have templates.  Often, they are blank or random data sources so they can be published and accessed by your team.  Generally, when a stakeholder navigates a few of these dashboards with familiar wireframes, it’s helpful.  They know where to go. Do you need a template?  There are a lot of great examples on Tableau Public, or you can get with your UI/UX team and create a company specific one.  

Creating a template is not what this post is about.  It’s what else we can do with templates to make it more empowering for developers.  Ever created a word document housing all your formulas?  Perhaps it’s housed on a shared drive.  I’ve done it everywhere I’ve worked. I can’t remember every single parenthesis on a nested IF.  Custom formatting?  I usually grab unicodes from open-source sites, paste it and call it a day. 

That got me thinking, what if everyone had access to these shortcuts?  Kind of like the preferences file when you’re dealing with custom color palettes, etc. That’s when it hit me.  What if we house all these custom calculations, formatting, and anything else in a published template?

Here’s how you can do it.

Set Up Data Source File

I’d probably go xls or csv here, but there are other ways. 

Create your columns and give them a name.  One column for each logical, custom format, or calculation.

Here’s what a percentage indicator column would look like:

Name your file and save.

Connect to Data Source and Build your Template

Once you connect to the file, create a new dashboard.

Create your template.  Add all the base features such as filter menu, info circle, footers, and so on.

Here’s what my template looks like:

Create your extract, publish to Cloud.

Now when a team member pulls down a template to begin a client ask, all he or she has to do is drag the column to the Text Mark and copy or view the formula.

Make sure to close the data source once your view(s) are built and the deliverable is published.

You could also use Claude Code to create this twbx for you.

The starter template is here.