Easier Excel Color Management

In a post entitled Making Your Excel Reports Unique, I talked about the mechanics of changing Excel’s default color palette and why you would want to do such a thing. While it is a fairly straightforward process, I find Excel’s implementation of the feature a bit cumbersome and time consuming, and if you’ve worked with it at any length, you probably did too.

I thought about how I could make the process a little easier, a little faster, and how I could simultaneously show you how even a little bit of programming can make your Excel work much easier. To that end, I’m pleased to present our first free downloadable Excel tool for your use, the Get and Set Colors tool.

Built with (and only tested on) Excel 2003, this provides a simpler, faster way to revise the color palette of an Excel workbook. Once you’ve customized a color palette within this file, you can easily copy it to another workbook.

A Simple Programming Demonstration

You won’t find fancy color controls, dialog boxes or other spiffy programmer’s tools used in this tool that you may have seen in other software, and that’s by design. Yes, those things would probably make the job of defining a color palette even easier, but that isn’t really the point of this exercise.

I built it simply so that someone without vast programming experience (or any really) can get a sense of what can be done with just a little bit of VBA code.

There are only two buttons within the tool that execute program code when clicked. The first button displays the decimal RGB (red, green, blue) values of the current color palette. The second button will set the color palette based on the RGB values shown on the sheet. Typically you would first revise the RGB values, and then click the second button.

Examine the Program Code

You can examine the program code by activating the Visual Basic Editor (Alt-F11). You do not need to supply a password to view the program code.

You’ll see that all of the programming is contained in just a few small routines. While this is hardly an all-encompassing introduction to programming, you’ll see that quite a bit can be accomplished with very little code. There’s even a bit of code that executes automatically with one of Excel’s built-in events. Can you find it?

Put it to Work

There are a few of ways you can supply color values:

  1. Use RGB values found online (there’s a link to a nice site included in the file),
  2. Get RGB values from other graphics software
  3. Experiment with your own values, or
  4. Get risky: have Excel generate the values for you using the Rand() function. You just might get a few winners!

Once you’ve built a new palette, copy it to a new workbook and format your reports for a unique and individual look. Remember, those colors are used for fonts, cell fills, borders, and more!

Get creative and stand out from the pack.

Download the free GetAndSetColors.xls file now.

Stay Tuned

There are great plans for more free stuff for users of all levels, so be sure to regularly visit the only site on the Web dedicated to Excel and Monarch, ExcelWithMonarch.com!