Since we had this topic for several times within our team and people kept making fun of me because I like it nice & shiny…even in my spreadsheets…herewith a short explanation on how to customize the color palette in Excel 2003 and re-use adapted palette in other workbooks.
Theory behind…
Excel’s color palette contains 56 colors which are split into a 3 different sections we all know:
- 40 Standard colors, which includes 8 system colors
- 8 Chart fill colors
- 8 Chart line colors.
The 40 standard colors are available in all color selection dialogs in Excel, including the drop-down dialogs on the Formatting toolbar. Chart Fills and Chart Lines are what Excel uses when automatically setting fill and line colors on charts.
So, let’s customize the workbook palette…
Open a blank spreadsheet, go to Tools -> Options and pick the Color tab. Here you can select each color in the palette and hit the “Modify” button to change it:
If you go to the custom tab in the Modify dialog, you can type in custom RGB values. In this example I used the orange from my website:
Unfortunately you have to do this manually for every single color you want to have changed in the Excel palette. Don’t forget to save the document because this takes quite some time dependent on the number of colors you want to change.
Start using it…
Once you have assigned all your colors, save the document in a place you remember. Then to use it, open up both your color palette workbook and the document you want to colorize. Go to Tools > Options in your working document, and go to the Colors tab again. At the bottom of this dialog there is a drop down with an option to “Copy colors from” (see figure above). Select your palette document, hit OK, and all colors are copied to your new document.
