Abdulazeez Abdullah Profile picture

Jul 23, 2022, 27 tweets

Was on a call with @BifolaX yesterday and the issue of colors came up. Felt like I needed to share this. Some of us are bad with colors, that’s who we are. I am one. The best we could do is find a way around this with technology.

For me I believe if there is a problem that technology can’t solve now, it’s just a matter of time before something is created/invented.

So, what do you do if you are bad with colors like me? The answer is simple, deploy technology to solve the problem. You don’t need to have sleepless nights worrying which combination of colors is suitable enough for your dashboard

Two technologies my mentor @MrsLUU1 showed me which you can deploy are.
1. coolors.co
2. imagecolorpicker.com/en

There are some people, you see that color combination, na there talent. If I come across one of their dashboards and I love the color combination, I either save it as an image somewhere or take a screenshot.

Then what next? Take the image to either of those websites and get the color codes from there.
Simple and straight-forward. People post dashboards almost every day, I let them worry about color combinations for me. There is no award for best in color combination.

Let’s take a quick tour on how I go about it. For now, we will be using google search

Step 1 - Search for a nice report online

Step 2 - Upload saved image and extract color codes

You can also create your own color combination

Note that while using coolors.co to create your own matching colors, you don't need to lock in two colors. You can just lock in 1 and it will suggest four other colors that matches the one you locked in

You can also decide to use color picker

Did you the most interesting part, you don't need to go through this step of selecting colors every time, you can just create a reusable theme that you can always import.

This is how.
First export the pallete

Select Code and download

Open the download file and it will look like this

What we need are these set of numbers.

Here is the theme template file you will edit and load into PowerBI.

drive.google.com/file/d/1akdb8n…

You will paste the colors generated into the square bracket

Then put an # sign in front of each colour code to make it look like this

By saving this, you've created a theme template which you can always reuse

All you just need to do is go to view tab in PowerBI

Select the drop down arrow and click on browse for themes

Locate the theme template and select it. if you can't find it, make sure you it is set to All files

On selecting the file, you will get a successful notification

Notice how the colors in my powerbi are exactly the same as those extracted on the websites.

For reuse purpose, you can now always import this theme and use the same set of colors.
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