Power BI Theme Generator & Tableau Color Palettes

About the Power BI Theme Generator & Tableau Color Palettes

Start from your brand colours, your logo (its colours are picked out in your browser) or a colour-blind-safe chart palette, and get a complete Power BI report theme: data colours, good, neutral and bad colours, the divergent colours for conditional formatting, the background, text and gridline colours and the table accent, fonts and sizes for titles, labels, callouts and headers, and default visual styles — borders, padding, background, shadow, titles, gridlines and data labels.

A mock report with cards, a bar chart, a line chart, a donut, a table and a slicer shows the theme as you change it, beside WCAG contrast checks and the data colours as people with colour vision deficiencies see them. The same colours make a Tableau Preferences.tps file with regular, sequential and diverging palettes, and a colour list for Data Studio (formerly Looker Studio).

Common uses

• Giving every Power BI report in an organisation the same brand colours, fonts and visual defaults.
• Turning a logo or a brand guide into report colours that pass contrast checks.
• Making Tableau and Data Studio dashboards match the Power BI ones.
• Checking that a chart palette still works for colour-blind readers before a report is published.

What goes into the theme JSON

The file uses the properties Microsoft documents in Create custom report themes in Power BI Desktop: name, dataColors, the structural colours (background, firstLevelElements to fourthLevelElements, secondaryBackground, tableAccent, with foreground as the first level), the status colours good, neutral and bad, the gradient colours maximum, center, minimum and null, hyperlink and visitedHyperlink, the four primary textClasses (callout, title, header, label) and visualStyles for every visual ("*") with the border, padding, background, dropShadow, title, valueAxis, categoryAxis and labels cards.

Before you download it, the theme is checked against the names and types of the published report-theme JSON schema — only top-level names the schema allows, text sizes of 8 to 60 points, hex colours, colours in visual styles written as { "solid": { "color": … } } — and the file links that schema, so an editor such as VS Code can autocomplete further changes.

How the colours are chosen

Your brand colours come first, in your order; the theme is filled up from the chosen palette with colours whose CIEDE2000 distance to those already chosen is at least 15 (at least 8 when the palette has too few that far apart), so no two look alike, leaving out palette colours that would all but vanish into the background (under 1.25:1, such as black on a dark report). The light report starts from the structural colours of Microsoft’s documented sample (#FFFFFF background, #252423 text, #605E5C secondary text, #F3F2F1 gridlines); the dark report uses a near-black canvas with light text. The table accent is your first colour, the link colour is your first colour darkened (or lightened) until it reaches 4.5:1 against the background, and the divergent gradient runs from a tone of the first data colour that differs clearly from your first, through a light grey (a dark grey on a dark report), to a tone of your first colour.

The Tableau palettes are made from the same colours: the data colours as a regular palette, a seven-step sequential palette from a light tint through your first colour to a darker shade, and a seven-step diverging palette — both mixed in the OKLab colour space so the steps look even.

The checks

• Contrast (WCAG 2.2): text, labels, titles and links need 4.5:1 against the background, and large text such as 45-point callouts 3:1 (SC 1.4.3); data colours and the good, neutral and bad colours need 3:1, the minimum for graphics (SC 1.4.11). A data colour under 3:1 is not wrong, but its bars and lines need data labels, outlines or gridlines to be told apart from the background.
• Colour vision: the data colours are shown as people with protanopia, deuteranopia or tritanopia see them — the full-severity matrices of Machado, Oliveira and Fernandes’ physiologically based model, applied to linear RGB — and in greyscale. Under each strip is the closest pair, by CIEDE2000; a pair closer than 10 is flagged, as such colours are easy to mix up in small marks.

Using the files

• Power BI Desktop: on the Design ribbon choose Import theme and pick the JSON file; in the Power BI service, import it from the Theme pane (Use report themes in Power BI). Visuals you formatted by hand keep their formatting until you reset them to default.
• Tableau Desktop: put the palettes into Preferences.tps in your My Tableau Repository folder and restart Tableau. If your file already has palettes, copy only the <color-palette> blocks into its <preferences> section (Create Custom Color Palettes). The Edit Colors dialog shows 20 colours, so longer palettes are split. Tableau Desktop 2025.3 and later can also make a palette in the app: in Edit Colors, choose Create Custom Palette and paste the hex codes of the colour list with Paste Swatches.
• Data Studio (formerly Looker Studio) has no theme file to import: open Theme and layout, choose Customize and enter the colours in the Edit theme panel, setting by setting, as the list names them (Themes).

Limitations

• The mock report shows the theme with the fonts installed on this device; Segoe UI and DIN, the fonts of Microsoft’s documented defaults, may be replaced by similar fonts here.
• The theme sets the default style of every visual; styles for single visual types and named style presets are not written (add them to the JSON by hand if you need them).
• Colours picked from a logo are the logo’s most common distinct colours; white, black and transparent areas are left out, and you can edit the list.
• The colour-vision strips simulate full dichromacy; milder forms (anomalous trichromacy) see the colours between the original and the strip.

Privacy

On this device: nothing is sent

Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot.