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.
- 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 voilà you have added your first custom color! Go on like this for all additional colors, you want to add
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
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!
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