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Philipp Kowalski is a self-taught Excel-lover, project manager and blog-owner. Besides developing "beautiful" solutions in MS' premier spreadsheet tool, he loves his fiance, his cats and surfing the net. He is CEO and owner of Inservo IT, the company behind Excel-King. He's also available on Twitter and YouTube. If you like this website, please leave a comment. If you want to know more visit the forums or look into the about section of this website.

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Imagine that you are doing a report in Excel for a customer / colleague / your boss and you are asked to take care, that it fits perfectly into the corporate identity. How can you enhance the standard colors of MSXL by the ones defined in your corporate design?

Well, it's quite simple. Although Excel 2003 only allows you to have 40 colors on total, it does not limit you, what colors these are (but it proposes you its standard colours). The process of substituting colors is very straight forward:

 

  • Define, what colors should be added. You must have the color codes in a RGB or HSL color model. RGB - which is more common and the one we will use here - stands for Red Green Blue, where HSL stands for Hue Saturation Luminance. If you do not know what RGB colors your CI has, simply take a picture of your logo or scan a letterhead and with that image on your computer, head over to Color Palette FX. Then directly beneath the picture upload your image (must be in jpg, png or gif image format) and click ...Create Palette. The software of this website then provides with max. 12 stripes of colors, that occur in your image. If you then click on any of these colors, you'll see its RGB value. As an example I took the image from this post, see the screenshot below.

Screenshot Color Palette FX

  • Note these three values and fire up MSXL. In it head to Tools > Options and select the Color tab. There you click the Modify button and choose the Custom tab. Make sure that under color model the RGB-model is selected. Then simply enter the RGB values you noted from Color Palette FX and voilĂ  you have added your first custom color! Go on like this for all additional colors, you want to add

Custom color options in Excel

The one thing that you must keep in mind when using this technique is that you are replacing other colors! That means for every new color you add, another color of the standard colors is gone. If you want to reset the original colors of MSXL, simply click the reset button in the Color tab of the Tools > Options menu

Reset original colors in MS Excel

Did you like this little trick? Do you have other cool websites, where you can generate image palettes from images? Join the discussion in adding your comment below!

Discuss this blog post in the forums (click the blue button)


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Written on Saturday, 09 May 2009 00:00 by Administrator

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0 #1 Chris 2012-01-03 21:06
Thanks for this space.. I've been trying to find a tutorial on creating custom palettes for excel 2010 (latest version) without luck.. Can you help. 2003 is not the same as 2010. Also once created can I open the file on another computer and still the custom colors in-tact?

Thanks,
Chris
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0 #2 Jason 2012-01-13 21:10
Thanks! Very helpful!
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