Christine,

Not sure if this is what you want, but when you are in a Dashboard, you can select Format | Dashboard.  One of the sections in the formatting panel there is Text Objects. You can format Font, Alignment, Shading, and Border. Tableau will apply your settings here to all Text Objects, including any you add after the fact. You should play with adding, removing, changing various settings, etc., in this panel section to see how it impacts existing and locally formatted Text Objects. I couldn't find anything specific in the Online Help about this, but maybe a Tableauian will see this and add some more info.

Independently, in this formatting panel, you can format other aspects of the Dashboard, including Shading and Title objects.

Does this help?

MANY BLESSINGS!

Peace and All Good!

Michael W Cristiani

Market Intelligence Group, LLC

Can't do that right now, as far as I know. :) Sorry

I second this one.  I have a dashboard with 22 text tables and it would be nice to be able to select several of them at once for formatting the text color, size, and alignment.

I agree Matt. What I would like to see that would resolve our situation is an expansion on the menu option:

Format->Workbook Theme

Even if it is a XML file that I have to create, like custom color pallets, it would be a great addition.

Yes, that would be a big time-saver if we could specify formats for all elements and save them as reusable custom themes.  Ideally this could be specified at the worksheet, dashboard, workbook, and application levels.

Yes - this kind of thing would be a much nicer addition. Worksheet/workbook themes/templates would be fantastic.

To the Tableau team: there seem to be multiple threads going back a number of years asking for a way to apply formatting across sheets or to make it simpler to set up templates, but nothing appears to have happened yet.  Is there a concerted effort being make to find a way to do this?  If not, is it because it is too complex to do so, or is it because it isn't perceived to be a high-priority item?

Michelle, we gather and aggregate customer feedback and requests from a variety of sources, including the forums.  This feedback plays a large role when we're planning out the features and fixes for each development cycle.  It is Tableau's policy not to comment on things that it hasn't done-and-released yet, so I can't say if or when we will implement something that addresses the consensus in this particular thread.  I will however say that there is general sympathy amongst the people I know in Tableau engineering with the frustrations expressed in this and many other format-related threads/discussions.  So I can say "it's on the list", but it is indeed a complex topic that we want to be careful to get right when we do invest time in this area.  There are no significant relevant changes in the in-beta 7.0 product.  So yes, it hasn't made the cut yet -- but things on the list tend to move upwards, as we address other features.  There are hundreds of things on "the list" and I can't even know exactly where this falls, but please do know that we are listening and that our mission statement is "to help people see and understand their data" rather than "to make people spend lots of time fiddling with formatting issues".

Thanks for your great response, James - it helps me to understand things better. Tableau is an amazing program, and I love it.  This is just an area that would make a huge difference to customers if we could find a way to fix it. 

One of my favorite implementations of this is the Excel format painter with single click (one-time paint) and double-click (format multiple items) functionality.  It's a very nice interface.

  http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/quickly-copy-formatting-with-the-format-painter-HA001054892.aspx

Thanks Michael, great tip!