A Complete Rewrite (Already!)

Loyal Excel with Monarch reader Nicholas Osdale-Popa contacted me to let me know that the Free Excel Color Tool inspired him so much that he not only decided to take it upon himself to take the concept to the next level, but decided to share his creation with all of us too!

While my initial tool shows how minimal coding can help make complex tasks easier, Nick’s Workbook Palette Changer demonstrates the effective use of additional control devices that Excel provides, such as drop down lists, buttons, and scroll bars. There’s even an ingenious way to manage your color schemes. But rather than describe his work myself, I thought it best that the developer tell you all about it! So here’s Nick with the details on how he builds tools such as this, his ideas on interface design, and more. Take it away Nick…

“Thanks Sandy for that intro.

I’ve been using/programming VBA with Excel since version 5.0 and was introduced to Monarch during its last DOS incarnation.

The Color Tool gave me an opportunity to create a nice little utility to show some of Excel’s power. I first set out to create this utility using VBA Forms, but I know that Sandy likes to try to use worksheets as his forms, so I ventured in that arena to see what I could accomplish. The code is free for you to look at and tweak to your desire, but I didn’t do any robust commenting, just a little intro to what each routine does. I tried to incorporate as much functionality into it as possible, but if you want to see something changed or added and don’t want to venture into the code, just leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do.

In the Simpson’s Episode “Trash of The Titan”, Homer’s campaign slogan was “Can’t someone else do it?”

That question can easily be asked about programming. I was not familiar with programming the controls (drop downs, list boxes) on an Excel worksheet, so I relied heavily on using Google to find the code for me. Once you get the general idea of what you are trying to do, you can usually find that someone has already done the work for you and all you really need to do is copy/paste and adjust it as necessary.

For the Random Color generator you’ll see an attribution to the site I pulled the code from. A lot of my programming skill was developed using the “Learn by Example” route: find the code you want, examine what it does and change as necessary. After a while you’ll start to understand programming a lot more and feel confident in creating your own applications.

I hope you find this utility useful enough! Happy coding!”

Thanks so much for that great insight into developing Excel tools Nick.

If you still haven’t clicked the link, download the Workbook Palette Changer now.

I encourage you to post any comments or questions you might have for Nick about this great Excel utility.

More great new free productivity software is currently under development, so be sure come back to the web’s only site where you can get the best tips and tools for both Excel and Monarch, ExcelWithMonarch.com!