UPCOMING WEBINAR: From Thousands of Tables To One Clear Story: using AI in survey analysis A pillar of creating beautiful reports and dashboards is consistency. Displayr has a robust templating system to aid you in achieving this. Any visualization can be saved as a template, which can then be applied throughout your document and across other documents in your company. This is useful when:
- You have lots of pages with the same layout and chart type, and want them to all be formatted the same.
- You need to make changes to the Chart tab settings across many of the same visualizations.
This article is broken out into the following sections:
- Worked example
- Method: Create and save a template
- Method: Apply a template to an existing table or visualization
- Method: Insert a template in your document to create a new visualization
- Method: Rename or delete a template
- Technical details
Requirements
- A visualization available in the Visualization Selector gallery. This includes visualizations created using R and not using R code, specialty tables, and the R Visualization template. For details on how to use this method on advanced and custom analysis outputs, see How to Save and Apply a Customized Analysis Output as a Template.
- The item being saved as a template must not be in an error state.
- All Properties
settings are saved in the template, excluding any data-related inputs (including filters, weights, and Rules).
- You can select multiple outputs on the same page to apply a single template simultaneously. To instead save multiple items as a template, see How to Create and Apply a Page Template.
Worked example
We have a table of brand attitudes (like + love):
And want to create a column visualization with customized settings, which we can then use as a template:
Method: Create and save a template
1. Click the Visualization button in the Properties of your table and select the type of visualization you want to make. In this example, we selected Column > Column.
2. Format the chart to match the requirements for your template, e.g., colors, fonts, and other formatting features. In this example, we:
- Sorted in decreasing order.
- Removed the caption.
- Allowed multiple colors in a single series.
- Applied a color template.
- Showed data labels and significance.
- Adjusted the X and Y axis settings (labels, orientation, grid lines, titles, etc.)
3. Right-click your visualization and select Save as Template.
From there, you have options about how the template is applied and where it is saved:
- Save as the default - this will replace built-in Displayr visualization look/settings with the new version you created. In other words, you will overwrite the built-in Column > Column visualizations with your template version for all column visualizations in documents that are saved in the same folder as the visualization template.
- Save with custom name - this will save your template with a custom template name, e.g., Column - Sorted, and you can selectively apply it to other visualizations instead of a universal replacement of the built-in visualization look/settings. If you select this option, you will be prompted to enter a Name for the template.
- Save to - choose the folder where you would like to save the template. Keep in mind that if you select the Save as default option, all documents that are in the selected folder will update to use this visualization template for the visualization type.
Method: Apply a template to an existing table or visualization
There are two ways to apply a template to an existing table or visualization.
Via the Apply Template menu option
1. Select a visualization or table on a Page or in the Report tree.
2. Right-click and select Apply Template.
3. Select the template you would like to apply from the dialog.
Hint: You can sort, filter, and search for specific templates in the dialog.
4. Click Apply.
5. Your visualization or table will update with the template applied.
Via the Visualization selector
- Select the table or visualization.
- From Properties, go to Visualization and select the general visualization type, i.e., column, bar, pie, etc..
- Select the version of the visualization that has a Template badge.
Hint: You can click Custom templates from the top-level visualization selector:
to see all of the custom templates you have saved:
Note: If you used the Save as default option when saving the template, you can view other available designs by clicking > Show all versions on the visualization:
Which will then show the available template options:
Method: Insert a template in your document to create a new visualization
1. Click Template from the toolbar.
2. Select the template you would like to add from the list.
Hint: You can sort, filter, and search for specific templates in the dialog.
3. Click Insert.
4. Click or draw an outline on your page where you would like the visualization to appear.
5. Select the appropriate data source under Data > Data Source > Data in Properties .
Method: Rename or delete a template
1. Click the User Initials icon at the top right corner and then select Displayr Cloud Drive.
2. All visualization templates are saved with a .QTemplate extension.
3. Hover over the relevant template file and click the symbol on the right to view the available buttons.
4. Click Rename or Delete and then follow the prompts.
Technical details
Previously, only legacy Visualizations with Tests could be saved and applied as a template via Properties :
All these chart templates have now automatically been migrated over to the new template system. Every template is saved in the Displayr Cloud Drive.
For modifying only the color and font settings across R-based Visualizations in a document, without changing any other settings, see How to Create an R Visualization Template for more details.
Next
How to Create and Apply a Page Template
How to Save and Apply a Customized Analysis Output as a Template
How to Save and Apply a Variable Set Template
How to Export Editable PowerPoint Charts
How to Update an Existing PowerPoint Document
How to Retrospectively Link PowerPoint Tables and Charts to Displayr Outputs
How to Use a PowerPoint Chart Style Template in a Displayr Export