Keywords: Excel, color palette, customize, modify, alternative colors.
Version: Excel 97 or later
Download: Palette tool (downloaded 2443 times)
One of the drawbacks in Excel is the very limited built-in color palette. When doing presentations and reports I often wish to use colors different than the standard offer to create visually more appealing graphs that blend in with the rest of the lay out.
The good news is that it is possible to change the standard palette to user defined colors, but doing so either involves VB scripting and can seem quite distracting to the average user, or tedious clicking as you change colours one-by-one via the standard Excel menues. Running the following command in the VB editor would chance the color of the first swatch to red:
ActiveWorkbook.Colors(1) = RGB(255, 0, 0)
Changing multiple colors in this way into a useful palette would rather be tiresome and time consuming. Therefore I decided to create a simple tool for changing parts of Excel palette into predefined (or user defined) palettes with a couple of mouse clicks. The tool is unsurprisingly called Excel palette tool.
The tool is built in an ordinary Excel sheet with a macro and allows the user to freely select the Excel palette from 5 predefined and one used defined palettes.
More advanced users can easily exchange the predefined paletters to their own choice.
Once you have created an Excel palette that you are happy with and want to use, simply select the Workbook in which you wish to use your new palette –> Tools –> Options –> Color –> Copy colors from, and in the drop-down list select Palette tool.xls. Now you should have a nice, customized palette to work with. A very basic example of how I used the Excel palette tool it is given in the picture below.
The tool automatically convert HEX color codes to RGB values, and you can enter your own custom palette colors (as hex-values) in the column designated “User defined“.
There is also a “Donate” button which will take you to PayPal. If you find this tool useful and use it in your work your donation would be considered a gracious token of appreciation.
Download: Palette tool (downloaded 2443 times)
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I am trying to change the colors on the palette used by Excel, and I downloaded your macro. However, I can’t seem to implement the following instruction in the 2007 version of Excel:
“Once you have created an Excel palette that you are happy with and want to use, simply select the Workbook in which you wish to use your new palette –> Tools –> Options –> Color –> Copy colors from, and in the drop-down list select Palette tool.xls”
Will this work in Excel 2007 or do you have another method for doing the same thing in this version? Thanks much for your work!