Application options of special color palettes are displayed in the following video-tutorial.
As you can see from the video-tutorial, your data are encoded to the color property in the same way as in previous versions. All 54 color palettes are divided into two basic groups - continuous and brewer palettes.
Continuous palettes are practical to apply to continuous numerical variables. You can choose from 19 palettes that are most commonly used in GIS visualization, e.g. rainbow, no_green, relief or topo palette.
Conversely, Brewer palettes are rather intended for categorical variables. Their definition can be found at http://colorbrewer2.org. On this page, you can test them in an interactive app. In general, we can divide them into three groups. These groups are defined by the nature of your data - sequential, diverging and qualitative color palettes.
They are applicable to a small number of categories. For each palette, the range of optimal categories number is listed in parentheses. Usually it’s a 3 to 9 categories. If you apply selected brewer palette to a larger number of categories, individual palette colors will automatically be interpolated.
The use of special color palettes is in GIS.XL add-in simple and fast. If you want to try this feature, you can do it also in the Demo version, where special palettes are fully functional.