How to Create and Apply a Visualization Template

A pillar of creating beautiful reports and dashboards is consistency. Displayr has a robust templating system to aid you in achieving this.

Visualization templates let you save a chart's formatting once and reuse it everywhere - across pages, documents, and your whole company - so every report stays visually consistent without reformatting each chart by hand.

This is useful when:

You have lots of pages with the same layout and chart type, and want them all formatted the same.
You need to make changes to the Chart tab settings across many of the same visualizations.

By the end of this article, you'll have created a reusable template and know the three ways to apply it: to existing charts, to new charts you insert, and as the new default for that chart type.

This article is broken out into the following sections:

Worked example
Create and save a template
Apply a template to an existing table or visualization
- Apply a template from the right-click menu
- Apply a template from the Visualization Selector
Insert a template in your document to create a new visualization
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:

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 every document in the folder you save it to, and it cascades down through that folder's subfolders too. A company-wide default can be set once at the top level (Home), and can be overridden at the folder level.
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.

Apply a template to an existing table or visualization

There are two ways to apply a template to an existing table or visualization.

Apply a template from the right-click menu

Select a visualization or table on a Page or in the Report tree.
Right-click and select Apply Template.
Select the template you would like to apply from the dialog.

Hint: You can sort, filter, and search for specific templates in the dialog.
Click Apply.

Your visualization or table will update with the template applied.

Apply a template from 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 with 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:

Insert a template in your document to create a new visualization

Click Template from the toolbar.
Select the template you would like to add from the list.

Hint: You can sort, filter, and search for specific templates in the dialog.
Click Insert.
Click or draw an outline on your page where you would like the visualization to appear.
Select the appropriate data source under Data > Data Source > Data in Properties .

Rename or delete a template

Click the User Initials icon at the top right corner and then select Displayr Cloud Drive.
All visualization templates are saved with a .QTemplate extension. Hover over the relevant template file and click the symbol on the right to view the available buttons.
Click Rename or Delete and then follow the prompts.

Technical details

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.
If you delete a template from the Cloud Drive, any visualizations where the template was applied will retain the template's layout. You will need to select a different template to update the visualization.
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.