Coloring a selection based on a simple cell formula (#colorofassignment)

Formatting a selection based on a simple cell formula (#formatofassignment)

Populating cell value based on Cell Interior Color (#popvalue)

Setting Interior Color based on another Cell (#popbased)

Sorting on Interior Cell Color (#sorting)

This is a somewhat frequent request, that is going to be prone to errors in interpretation of what color is. You can obtain ColorIndex or RGB but how would you sort that meaningfully. Finally you are going to have problems with recalculaton.

This topic is covered further on a separate page: Color, Sorting on Color

Interior Color, using Count, SUM, etc. (#count)

If the colors you want to test are due to Conditional Formatting then use the same kind of test that you used for Conditional Formatting, and the results will be immediate (no recalculation needed) i.e.
=COUNTIF(D12:D16,TRUE)
=SUMIF(D12:D16,TRUE,E12:E16)

If the colors are not from C.F. you will have to use a User Defined Function to find this information and since formatting is not registered as a cell change you will have to wait for a recalculation to occur to get a valid answer. You can but should not make the macro Volatile, since by doing that you could bring your Excel to an extremely slow state. Examples follow in the next paragraph.

See my Functions for Determining Interior Color of Another Cell described earlier for RGB, ColorIndex, and HEX.

Chip Pearson has some additional color functions using a little different approach unfortunately for whatever reason he does not provide (#cpcolorsx) examples of his Functions For Cell Colors:

The following examples obtain the colorindex from another cell which is best, because colorindex colors can be changed by changing the palette.

Interior, colorindex of
=cellcolorindex(A$3,0)
if you installed in your personal.xls workbook to be available to all workbooks, use
=personal.xls!cellcolorindex(A$3,0)

Font, colorindex of
=cellcolorindex(A$3,1)

Count the cells with same interior color as A$3
=countbycolor(A$1:A$17,cellcolorindex(A$3,0))

Count the cells with same font color as A$3
=countbycolor(A$1:A$16,cellcolorindex(A$3,1),1)

Sum of the cells with same interior color as A$3
=sumbycolor(A$1:A$16,cellcolorindex(A$3))

#NAME? error will occur if you misspell one of the UDF (User Defined Function) above or did not install the function. A #VALUE! error may occur if you did not install a function used inside or misuse it. Instructions to install macros and User Defined Functions can be found on my formula.htm page.

To work with shading instead of colorindex use .pattern instead of .colorindex and rename functions accordingly. Specific patterns include such name as: xlgray8, xlgrid, xlvertical

Processing Coloured Cells, Bob Phillips, informative text, and macro subroutines

Determining the Row color based on cell value in that row (#rowcolor)

Conditional Formatting introduced in Excel 97 is limited to 3 conditions. With more than 3 conditions a macro would be required, such as shown below. Another kind of macro that you could use is an Event Macro. Note even if you have an Event macro you will probably want a normal macro to fix things up ahead of time. A more complicated macro differentiating text values, numbers, and empty cells in addition to ranges of numbers.

Delete Rows Based on RED interior color in Column A (#DelRows)

The following will delete the entire row if it sees RED as define by ColorIndex = 3 There are some caveats:

• Conditional Formatting colors are invisible to VBA.
• The ColorIndex = 3 is the default someone could change it
• Not everybody is going to be able to distinguish RED from colors close to it and then there is Red/Green colorblindness.
• Not all monitors are going to show colors alike, though RED is pretty safe in that regard.

Comments for the following code can be found below the macro DelCellsUp on another web page.

HEX Conversions for RGB values (#hexconv)

Hex characters are actually characters, but represent binary numbers.

RGB values are represented by 6 hex digits. The first pair of digits represents Red, the next Green, and the last Blue. The values range from 0 to 255, or in hex from 00 to FF. Given a six hex digit representation in hex characters such as 00C0C8 as hex characters simply use left, and mid to separate them the digit pairs. Look in HELP for more information about HEX2DEC and DEC2HEX. Suppose B14 had a Long (Binary) integer in it and you want 6 hex digits for RGB. HEX2DEC and DEC2HEX are part of the Statistical Analysis Toolpak [menu] [list]

There are 256³ RGB colors (16,777,216) and only 56 colorindex colors in the palette; so a one to one match of each is not only impossible, but the colors in the palette can be reassigned to different colors.

Conversion of Font color in Excel to a hex string for HTML (via VBA code) (#hexconvxl)

The following code was used in XL2HTMLx conversion of an Excel sheet to HTML. Note Excel appears to store binary values in reverse order or perhaps this is just “big-endian” (main frames, 1234 order) vs. “little-endian” (most PCs, 4321 order). Conversion of a single binary decimal number to decimal RGB components (WS formulas) If you have a character value such as 00C0C8 or you start from a Long (Binary) integer, your can incorporate the above formula into the following

I have not provided for the possibility of 3-digit hex numbers in HTML like #333 #608 which are equivalent to #333333 and #660088, simply because I would never create the values that way myself.

I also would never produce RGB(red,green,blue) strings for use in HTML and they are mostly done incorrectly (without quotes) in most places that I see them used and harder to work with visually when coding or comparing source.

Changing the Colors of your Excel Color Palette (#chgpalette)

To change a color in your palette go to Tools —> Options —> Color where you can change a color by double-clicking on a color cell. Use Reset to revert back to defaults. Also see Help —> colors, changing

Changing the default Shading Color (Fill Color) / (#fillcolor)

The default shading color is yellow (RGB: 255, 255, 0). If you want to change it for a workbook you will have to change the color in that position of the palette. Best to exchange the color with another color on the palette say Lt Green (RGB: 204, 255, 204) using Tools, Options, Colors, Modify, Custom. You can always use Reset to restore normal palette for the workbook.

Changing the Color of your Excel Cell Comment (#cellcommentcolor)

A frequent question in the newsgroups is how to change the default colors in the Cell Comments. The name of the author is picked up from your Tools, Options, General, User Name. (you cannot change the color of the red triangle)

Cell Comments are Tool Tips so to change your default you must change your Windows default. To change only once cell comment double-click on the border of the cell comment and make your changes.

To change Tool Tips. (Changes to Windows settings affect ALL applications)
Windows START, settings, control panel, Display (monitor icon)

Retain a copy of your Original Control Display Settings (#BackupDisplay)
Before continuing it might be a good idea to name your current settings and then name your new settings.

• Press [Save As] button then assign the scheme to something like Windows out of the box mmm dd, yyyyy (current date).
• Press [Save As] button then assign your own name to the scheme i.e. “David 2000-06-22”, and all future changes would be made to this scheme.
• In the item: pull down, rather than pulling down you can simply place cursor in the box and then use the cursor to cycle up or down through the choices. Select “Tool Tip” and make changes to font, fontsize, text color, background color as wanted. not sure if you actually will change the fontname or not.

You can select parts of the windows shown which will change the item selected, but tool tips is not one of them, you have to use the pull down.

My own settings show: red text, yellow background, 8 point, MS Sans Serif, non bold, non italic. (I’m not sure what they were originally).

More material on Cell Comments

Changing the Colors of Worksheet Tabs (#tabs)

The color of the tabs is controlled by Windows, you can change the scrollbar setting but it will affect everything in Windows and until Excel 2002 all tabs had to be the same color as the scrollbar. Changes to size of scrollbar will change size of tabs. Changes to color affect both tabs and all scrollbars in Windows (or at least in Office). You can change the fontsize on the sheet tab, but not the font color or font size within the sheet tabs. Before making changes see Retain a copy of your Original Control Display Settings on this page.

In Excel 2002 you can color individual worksheet tabs. Here is a tip from Jessica Kovalik in exceltip at Microsoft ’s Office site.

• Select the sheets you want to color by holding down the CTRL key and clicking the tabs.
• On the Format menu, point to Sheet, and then click Tab Color. You can also right-click the sheet tab and then click Tab Color.
• Click the color you want, and click OK.

In VBA (for Excel 2002) the equivalent would be:
Activesheet.Tab.ColorIndex = 50

I believe the normal reason to color tabs is to provide an organization to them. You can sort sheet tabs with a macro. You can enhance your sorted arrangement by preceding the sheet tab with some less conspicuous small letters prefixes. i.e.
k.FunctKeys, k.ShortCutKeys
If working with dates for sheetnames, spell the year out and place it first
2002-10, 2002-11, 2002-12, 2003-01
sort sheet tabs into alphabetical order in http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/buildtoc.htm#sortallsheets
The main topic on that page is to create a Table of Contents with hyperlinks to the other sheets. Shorter versions with just membernames can be found in buildtoc.htm. A builtin alternative to navigate to a sheet via the More Sheets dialog listing (also available from a macro) is to right-click on a scrolling arrow in lower left corner, the sheets are listed in the same order as the worksheet tabs at the bottom of your spreadsheet (another reason to sort your worksheets).
Sort sheets by color of sheet tab, by colorindex number, Chip Pearson’s sortws.htm

There is one problem that I know of with the arrangement of sheet tabs. You will probably have trouble with Mail Merge if the worksheet to be used in Mail Merge is not the first worksheet.

You can go through 90 worksheets very quickly using Ctrl+PageDn to go down through the worksheet tabs, or Ctrl+PageUp to backup through the tabs. I prefer to use a couple of macros and toolbar buttons –

Color Triangles in Excel (#triangles)

• Red , upper-right corner of a cell indicates a Cell Comment
• Black, upper-left corner of a cell indicates highlight changes: Tools, Track changes, Highlight Changes
• Green, upper-left corner of a cell indicates a potential error in the formula in the cell. To turn off or adjust settings: select Tools, Options, and select the Error Checking (tab) and uncheck «Clear the Enable Background Error Checking». [new in Excel 2002 (dead link at MS]and you can change the color of error indicator triangle there as well. Not shown if Track Changes is also in effect.
• Purple, lower-right corner of a cell indicates a smart tag. [new in Excel 2002 (XP)] to turn off or adjust settings: select Tools, Options, and select the Error Checking tab. [more]

Printing the comment indicator by aligning a shape over the upper right corner of cells with comments. see Print Worksheet with Comment Indicators (contextures.com)

Manually Changing the Interior Color of Worksheet Cells (#manual)

Setting the interior color of the active cell, specifically Applies to all cells in a selection that you can add to with the use of the Ctrl key.
Format —> cells —> patterns and colors

You can install a button on your toolbar to hasten the process, it looks like a dripping paint can.
View —> customize —> toolbars —> custom —> format
select the dripping paint bucked, marked Fill Color and drag it to your toolbar (if not already there).

Color Coding Cells for Usage (#colorcoding)

You can color code cells or text to help with reading and/or to help with data entry. Please keep in mind that laptops and color-blind people may not see colors the same as you do.

• Pale color shading can be used to designate input areas, and can be expanded to different colors for input from different areas (departments).
• Formula results might be shown with a different text color, and the formulas themselves and other non-input areas such as descriptions might be protected from accidental changes.
• Cells with links will generally show up in blue or purple with underlining. Best not to change what people expect.
• Highlight cells for review that you modified or find questionable. Change them back at a later time. Also see tracking in Highlight changes.

Related: Conditional Formatting, Format/Styles, Filtering, Tracking

Color Charts on the Web (#colorcharts)

Hex Color Chart for the HTML Resource Guide for a faster loading variation of Jacobson ’s hex chart by Jack Wilson. [ http://www.bitmedia.com/colors/ ] It ’s faster because it uses tables with BGCOLOR instead of a lot of bit maps. [ archived copy]

Color Chart at Alan Barasch ’s Excel site has a slider to change the background color so you can check combinations of cell colors in foreground to varied background colors in HTML. Pretty neat. He also has a similar Font Color Chart (text background), and Color Chart (page background) a slider to change cell background color. (Charts and sliders each have 216 colors) Works only in Internet Explorer, but is one of the easiest to use.

Color Detector (#detector)

cosmin.com — Color Detector, Freeware program to detect the color of any pixel on the screen. Simply run the program, point the mouse cursor anywhere on the screen, and the color detector window will display the RGB values, HTML hex code, and the color name of the color of the pixel pointed to by the mouse cursor. You can invoke the installed .exe link directly with IE, or if using Firefox by invoking through your customized Launchy extension to invoke with Explorer. ( colordector.exe)

If you are using Firefox for browsing HTML you might want to also install Colorzilla extension for working within Firefox – Eyedropper (color sampler, status bar options), ColorPicker, Page Zoomer, DOM inspector (if present). More extensions on my Firefox Customization (Notes) page.

Color Wheel Picker, is similar to Color Detector but works only on its page with a color wheel so you can pick your color (IE active-x only)

Back To Font Web Color Picker, select your colors and create the styles to place into your HTML coding. Also see CSS (Style Sheets) on other references on my Font page.

HTML Colors — Color picker, AMPsoft, displays the hex, dec and RGB values, via taskbar icon or hotkey (is not a detector)

Palette Grabber :: Firefox Add-ons, Creates a color palette for Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP, Flash, Fireworks, Paint.NET, or OS X based on the current page.

Color Luminance (#Luma)

In color television luminance is calculated (approximately) like this (1 = white, represented by 1V signal voltage):
L = R*0.3+G*0.59+B*0.11

This formula was created to make the color video signal compatible with black and white monitors/receivers. Monochrome monitors are still in use as professional viewfinders on many TV cameras, since they create a sharper image than one made from a color matrix. Posted by Harald Staff, plus the reference below.

Colors used in other programs (not Excel) / (#pgms)

• Color Cube (geocities archive), see The JavaScript Source: Image Effects: Basic Color Cube. Show what different background colors (in HTML) would look like from a choice of 216 (18×12) colors.
• Syd Allan: HTML Tag an Color Test Page, has a list of other sites with color information, and has color tables of colors used in SAS.

Coloring Code (#coloringcode)

• Pretty Print printing VBA Code in colors as you see them on your screen.
• HTML Kit also has color provisions and is set up for HTML. HTML-Kit described in Related area of my Excel to HTML page.

Colors used in the Visual Basic Editor (#vbe)

Not going to go into this in detail here or on the page for the Visual Basic Editor (VBE) Window but you can change the colors in the code window (Alt+F11, F7) for background, font and indicator for each of these texts: Normal, Selection, Syntax Error, Execution Point, Break Point, Comment, Keyword, Identifier, Bookmark, and Call Return. [VBE Tools menu, Options, Editor Format (tab) ]

Browsers ☷ ☷ ☷☷

There are bookmarklets (JavaScript code) that are stored as bookmarks that can be run in all browsers, but specific bookmarklets may be limited to one browser due to limitations in a browser. There are several webpages with bookmarklets that involve color at squarefree.com, specifically Color Bookmarklets and Bookmarklets for Zapping Annoyances.

Related ☷☷ ☷ ☷

Pages on this site using Color (#thissite)

• Color, Sorting on Color
• Coloring within Ranges, Examples
• Conditional Formatting,
  Finding Conditional Formatting Formulas afterwards (—identify—); CondFormula macro also on Formula page.
• Event macros, example for change event using Case statement makes use of colorindex and refers back to this page.
• Excel to HTML conversions, macros XL2HTML, XL2HTMLx and other, along with references to other HTML materials, and conversions.
• Font
• Formula page, Custom Formatting (custom number formatting), and also seen above on this page.

Newsgroup Postings on Colors (#postings)

• Coloring Capital Letters within a cell, posting by Mike Currie, 2002-12-19, in excel.misc, colors capitals Red [3], non-capitals as black [lowercase and digits with 1] and error cells with Teal [14] using a Change Event macro, I included a comparable ColorCapsCatchUp macro for use on existing cells prior to installing the Change Event macro. You can search Google Groups for the string Characters(Start:= for additional examples of formatting or coloring parts of text strings.
• Coloring for Day of Week in a Macro, Bob Phillips, 2004-01-25.
• RGB Colors posted collection of links by Tom Ogilvy (2000-05-10). — and it doesn’t even have the varied names of colors recognized by some of the browsers.
• Showing the Color dialog, showing the user assigned colors

Other Pages on Colors in Excel (#otherxl)

• Chip Pearson ’s «Functions For Cell Colors». Nice functions but no examples there, see my examples above.
• Conditional Chart Examples, Jon Peltier, how to change the formatting of a chart ’s plotted points (markers, bar fill color, etc.) based on the values of the points
• Excel code to modify Excel chart palette colors — The PowerPoint FAQ, Brian Reilly. The supplied code are mostly variations of black to point out that excel is not applying the actual RGB but the ColorIndex. (archive 2001-12-22, posted).
• Colour Palette Tool, Ed Ferrero, to modify the colour palette, and save it as a small file that can be distributed (newusers, 206-02-15).

Colorblind (#colorblind)

• How do things look to colorblind people?
• ColorBrewer, by Cindy Brewer some color schemes for color separations as on maps (qualitative), as on population densities (sequential), as emphasis on low and high values as in ages (diverging). Shows whether good for color-blind, photocopy, LCD projector, CRT-friendly, printer friendly. For what I tried, the choices are so distinct that I did’t see any problems on my laptop (32 bit color) even though marked as not good for laptops. [color choices, also see Jenks below] — Maybe I can’t find what I thought was there
• Vischeck: VischeckURL, color blindness check of your designated web page (URL) as seen by someone with Deuteranope (a form of red/green color deficit), Protanope (another form of red/green color deficit), Tritanope (a blue/yellow deficit- very rare). Look further into site and the numbers are adjustable for further testing. The displays on this site use technology licensed by Stanford University.
• Color Scheme Designer 3, Simulate color vision deficiency.

Other Pages Making Use of Color (#other)

• Changing Font color for certain words within a cell, Dave Peterson, macro, 2003-05-28 [also see Font page]
• Color, Sorting on Color, not recommended, at least not in any Excel through Excel 2000, but the topic does come up.
• A Color Picker Dialog Box, John Walkenbach, Tip49. An alternative to not being able to determine the current selected color in the color palette dialog boxes (xlDialogColorPalette).
• Coloring within Ranges, Examples
• Color Palette Generator, degraeve, Enter the URL of an image to get a color palette (10 colors) that matches the image. Useful in creating a website color palette that matches a key image to be used for a website. [referened by Favicon Generator]
• Color Tools, links provided at Univ. Of Minnesota
• Conditional Formatting was introduced with Excel 97 and is a terrific feature, but there is a limit of 3 conditional sets per cell grouping (like 3 wishes). Conditional Formatting, while in effect for a cell, will override the text colors that can be produced for numeric values by normal cell formatting.
• Conversion to Grayscale, a chapter in a book available online about color Grokking the GIMP by Carey Bunks.
• Jenks Natural Breaks, part of the Virtual Geography Department Project described in Cartography Working Group of the Department of Geography, Dartmouth College.
• Logos and Graphics into headers/footers, you can assign the top rows of your spreadsheet for use as headers to include logos, logos in color, and to include fonts in color. Fonts are available only in one color in the actual headings and footings— black. For footers you are out of luck as far as alternatives to black.
• Office 2007: Using Color in Excel and PowerPoint, 2007, Excel and PowerPoint provide a number of common colors for quick access from the FILL buttons on the Ribbon. If you prefer to use a different color or a customized color from the dialog color box.
• Security hardware encryption, terms for similar information: cryptography, encryption, stenography, digital watermarks
• Restore Hyperlink Style, restore normal hyperlink colors and formatting
• Rowliner « , Chip Pearson. RowLiner add-in allows you have Excel automatically draw row and/or column lines around the active cell, making it easier to view rows and columns, especially when gridlines are not visible. But you lose the ability to use undo (Ctrl+Z) with macros and with addins.
• Setting Colors and Safe Colors in HTML, Dave Raggett’s Introduction to CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
• Using Colors in Excel Charts, PTS Blog, Jon Peltier by Jon Peltier
• Worksheet Change Events, shows changing color of cells upon Change.

Other Things not necessary related to Colors (#font)

Problems formatting color (#problems)

• Can’t see font on a black background: When formatting Cell Comment or Text Box format the FONT from the Font tab, changing the line color under the Color Tab will not affect the font. (2004-03-31, McRitchie, misc)
• Printer out of a color of ink.
• File, Page Setup, Sheet, Print B&W — will remove interior color, and will print font, and borders in black. Print Preview shows up same as Printed copy (in black and white).
• Use of a template such as book.xlt and sheet.xlt
• Use of Format, Style can seem like a template was used to set up colors, but can’t find any such format. Format, Style, should be normal and no shading
• Colors are only missing on monitor, due to High Contrast Accessibility option. A variation of same problem: The fill color, the fill pattern, or the line color of a WordArt or AutoShape object in an Office document does not change
• Also see companion page – Colors as seen on Monitor, and in Preview and Print, which attempts to show what you might see.
• You see a lot of gray (grey) on the sheet and you may see big page numbers. That would be page break Preview, eliminate with Eliminate with View, Normal
• Excel 2003 apply the Service Pack, can’t find anything on printing problems, but have been told it fixes some kind of problem. Always be sure to keep your software updated. Description of the Excel 2003 post-Service Pack 1 hotfix package: February 20, 2005. Though there is a scaling problem with margins print 1 pages wide by 1 pages tall.

Printers, Printing and colors — How Printers work (#printers)

Microsoft Knowledge DataBase (#mskb)

Q97600 Printed Colors Different than on Screen: Blue is Purple, etc. This is not a problem with your printer driver, with Microsoft Windows, or with your printer. RGB colors (light) are additive. CMYK colors (pigments) are subtractive. Color-Matching Blues [PC Magazine Apr 9, 1996].

Q149170 — Sample Visual Basic Code to Create Color Index Table
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=149170

Q170781 XL: RGB Function May Map to Incorrect Color
The color property accepts an RGB triple and maps it to the nearest color index. When the property retrieves the color value, it returns the RGB color of the index, which may be different from the value you typed. In the example, RGB(65,0,0) is mapped to Dark Red (RGB(128,0,0)), but RGB(64,0,0) is mapped to Black (RGB(0,0,0)).

Q157202 — XL97: Color Palette Looks Different in MS Excel 97
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=157202
Q211533 — XL2000: Color Palette Looks Different in Microsoft Excel 2000
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=211533
Q291293 — XL2002: Color Palette Looks Different in Microsoft Excel 2002
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=291293

Q163230 — Thick Borders May Not Be Printed in Low Printer Resolution (163230) — When you print thick borders in Microsoft Excel, the borders may be partially printed, or the borders may not be printed at all.

Q320531 — OFF: Changes to Fill Color and Fill Pattern Are Not Displayed,
Incorrect/missing colors may occur with use of High Contrast under Display tab of Accessibility Options. Colors don’t show on monitor however, you may be able to see the changes in print preview and on a printed page. Also see Problems topic.

Microsoft MSDN (#msdn)

ColorIndex Property, article within Office Web Components in MSDN (shows the color palette).

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