How to create customized color themes for your PowerBI visuals

I found it is just as important to have a nice looking dashboard/reports as the data itself. In this blog, I want to share with you some good tricks which I learned recetly from PowerBI.com and a Youtube channel EnterpriseDNA to create customized color themes in PowerBI desktop.

By default, the customized theme feature is not enabled in PowerBI desktop. So what you need to do is go to ‘File’ -> ‘Options and Settings’

PowerBI Option Change

then, enable the ‘Custom Report Themes’ in ‘Preview Features’ section.

Custom Report Theme Enable

After restarting your PowerBI desktop, you will see ‘Themes’ under ‘Home’ tab

Themes tab

By choosing ‘Switch Themes’, you can import your customized theme saved as JSON file.

Typical JSON Code for themes like this

{    “name”: “St Patricks Day”,
“dataColors”: [“#568410”, “#3A6108”, “#70A322”, “#915203”, “#D79A12”, “#bb7711”, “#114400”, “#aacc66”],
“background”:”#FFFFFF”,
“foreground”: “#3A6108”,
“tableAccent”: “#568410” }
From <https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-desktop-report-themes/>

But, how could we get a good color combination which looks good if I am not a artist?

Usually, I will create the foundation colors based on company logo or image. Since Halloween is coming soon, let’s use a Halloween picture as an example.

There is a site recommended http://palettefx.com/ which helps you to find all the colors used in the image.

Color Pickers

After that, you use Notepad and edit the JSON code I shared above and save as .json file. Json code

Now, you can import the JSON file into PowerBI use the ‘Switch Themes’ add-in we got as your customized theme.

Jason file

Now, you can use your new customized theme to build your PowerBI reports!

There is a PowerBI theme Gallery: https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Themes-Gallery/bd-p/ThemesGalleryHopefully it helps.

Your friend, Annie

 

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