Issue with Cell Fill Color Randomly Being Switched from No Fill to Grey

[mp1021257]

Hi,

I am experiencing an issue with Excel where cell background colors are randomly being changed to a light gray from no fill.

Doing a bit of investigative work, I have been able to figure out what is happening (I just don’t know why it is happening, or how to stop it).

Specifically, what is happening is, a pattern color is being added to the cells that are affected. In particular, the pattern color, which oddly enough appears to be lime green (RGB code 124 252 0), results in a gray looking fill appearing in the cell.

When I hit Ctrl + 1 and navigate to the Fill tab, I see no color provided as the Background Color. This prevents me from being able to run a Ctrl + H search and replace all gray fill with no fill.

Oddly enough, if I select no fill for the affected cells, the light gray background color disappears.

I do not really know what to make of it. Has anyone had a similar issue before? Or, can anyone think of an easy solution to get rid of the problem?

The only solution I have right now is to manually navigate to each affected cell, and remove the fill (like I mentioned, I cannot search replace the fill color, because Excel does not recognize the cells as having any fill color).

Thanks for the help!

 

[mp1021257]

One additional note / clarifying point: The gray color that is being added to the cells matches the exact color of my windows background (RGB 212 208 200). If I change the color of my windows background to a different shade of gray (I use a gray windows background to reduce eye strain when I work in Excel), the color of the affected cells changes to match the new color of my windows background. For example, I just changed my windows background to RGB 192 192 192, and the fill of the affected cells changed to 192 192 192 as well. When I changed it back, the affected cells, changed back as well, once I reopened the excel spreadsheet I was working on. There was a bit of time before I closed and reopened the spreadsheet that the affected cells still had a fill color of RGB 192 192 192, and the Windows background was RGB 212 208 200, but like I said, when I closed and reopened the workbook, the affected cells reverted back to a fill of 212 208 200.

Said simply, the affected cells adjust automatically to match the color of the windows background whenever the workbook is opened.

 

[RoryA]

Is there any code in the workbook, or any conditional formatting set up?

 

[mp1021257]

Actually, figured out that the problem was an XLS add-in that I was using that has a trace precedents feature. The feature has an option to highlight the dependent cells of a given formula one-by-one so that you can see what the drivers of the formula are. It turns out that by highlighting the cells, which is done using a lime green pattern color, the cells that were highlighted subsequently take on the color of the windows background (gray in this case).

In short, the problem had nothing to do with Excel itself; it was just an issue with the specific add-in I was using.