Customizing Excel Easily for a Personal Touch
If you’ve been working with Excel, or any of the Office products for that matter, you’ve seen your organization produce documents with the same basic look and feel time and time again. One of the easiest ways to shake things up a bit, and simultaneously give your documents a bit more polish, is to change the colour scheme.
The introduction of Excel 2007 provides a wider range of colour selections, but most Excel users have older versions with a more limited colour palette. For instance, Excel 2003 only makes 40 colours available within your workbook. These are the colours available for items like fonts, cell shading and borders.
It’s a fairly straightforward, if a bit laborious, process to change Excel’s default colours.
Before we dive into the mechanics of altering the default colours, we should chat about what a customized palette can offer you, and exactly what you might consider when it comes to determining what colours you’ll use.
Home improvement shows are all the rage these days on television. Most times (but certainly not always, at least to me!), the designers come up with some wonderful schemes that really transform rooms from drab to “fab”. Why are they successful so frequently?
Matisse or Monet?
While they might come by it naturally, the odds are that they’ve been educated about colour, and the foundation for all aspects of colour design, the colour wheel.
Let me remove all doubt, if there were any, right now. I’m no colour expert. So I look for inspiration and professional advice. My favorite sources lately have been Color Schemer and ColorBrewer.
Color Schemer is great in that you can quickly see a range of colours. Click on a single colour and you’re immediately presented with an entire scheme of colours. You also get the RGB (Red Green Blue) values for each colour, which you need if you want to replicate that scheme in Excel. There are even buttons to slightly lighten or darken the scheme. Easy and quick, Color Schemer is a great tool.
ColorBrewer was built to assist map makers with their colour needs. It utilizes a step by step approach to help you out. First you choose how many main colours, or segments, you want. You’re limited here though; you can only choose from three to nine colours. Next, you choose a legend type, which I can best describe as “shading levels”, or maybe “colour styles”. I did say that I’m no designer, didn’t I?
Finally, you click on a mini legend to see how those colours work together in the sample map. Try to see the map as a spreadsheet gone wrong.
We’re All Friends Here
Now, while all of this is definitely useful, the best feature is the box with the icons in the bottom left. These give you instant information as to whether your colours are:
- Colour blind friendly
- Photocopy friendly
- LCD projector friendly
- LCD laptop friendly
- CRT friendly, and
- Colour printing friendly
If there’s a concern, you’ll see a question mark over the icon in question. If that colour scheme really shouldn’t be used for a particular purpose or audience, you’ll see a red X on the icon. For example you might see that your scheme really won’t photocopy well, in that the colour distinctions may not be reproduced properly.
It’s in this box that you’ll also get the exact RGB values you’ll need by selecting the RGB icon.
By now you’ve got the tools at hand, or you know where to get them, and you hopefully have a particular presentation in mind. So how do you actually go about making it happen?
Go to the Tools menu, and select Options. Activate the Color tab.
You’re presented with a set of colour samples. This is the default palette. What’s perhaps not so obvious is that these aren’t just samples, but are in fact coloured icons, and that the icon in the top row, leftmost column, is currently selected. Notice the border around the icon. This is how Excel shows you that this is colour that you currently control.
Click the Modify button. Here are the Standard colours from which you can easily select, and change the current colour (the colour you saw in the top row, leftmost column). That colour is preview here in a larger sample.
Selecting any of the colours in the hexagonal sample will change the current colour. For rough experimentation, using these colours will do the job. And you may even decide that that’ll do nicely.
But for precise colour control, you need to go to the Custom tab. With the RGB model selected, supply the values you acquired from the other web sites. Alternatively, if you have other graphics programs available you may use the tools your favorite program supplies. Click OK to return to the colour palette.
Continue on changing the default colours as required to build up your custom palette. Click on a colour icon, then modify its value and return to the palette.
You may have noticed drop down in the lower part of the dialog, entitled “Copy colors from”. This is a great time saver!
Reduce, Reuse and Recycle
When you change the default palette, you’re changing the colors available in the current workbook only, not this and all future workbooks. New workbooks you create will continue to have Excel’s default colours.
“That’s horrible,” you say. “I really put a lot of effort into building this palette and I sure don’t want to do that every time I want to use it!”
Fear not. Save your workbook as “My Custom Workbook Palette.xls”, and create a new blank workbook (Ctrl-n). Imagine that this new workbook will end up being a new report that you want to have an appearance consistent with the last one you just made.
With both workbooks open, and the blank one active, go to the Tools menu, Options Color. Now open the “Copy colors from” dropdown and select the file named “My Custom Workbook Palette.xls”.
Nice! You’re just duplicated the color palette in your new workbook in a fraction of a second.
Think about how you can use colour to your advantage. Look at how magazines and newspapers create eye-catching graphics. Then take a few minutes to study Excel in terms of what objects allow you to set colours. Look at your fonts, borders, cell shading, charts and so on. Put some thought into whether you want to accept the default instead of just charging ahead with it. After all, the default is really just someone’s suggestion.
When is Good Enough Not Good Enough?
Now of course I wouldn’t spend an inordinate amount of time prettying up every report I made. But every once in a while you’ll think to yourself, “This one is important”. Don’t let that one be run of the mill. Take the extra time to dress it up; the reporting equivalent of a night on the town. Make it stand out. Make it really remarkable.
When you’re spotlighting data you’ve extracted, your audience will know that you not only excel with Monarch, but Excel too!
