Don upgraded to Excel 2010, from Excel 2003, and discovered that he could no longer easily find and use the colors he'd become accustomed to using in his workbooks. How did the Exclusive "MrExcel Color Add-In" develop from this? Watch Episode #1299.
Transcript of the video:
MrExcel podcast is sponsored by Easy-XL.
Learn Excel from MrExcel podcast. Episode 1290 Legacy Colors Well, hey all right! Welcome back to the MrExcel netcast. I'm Bill Jelen.
A friend named Don, who just upgraded to excel 2010, kind of at my prompting, and so, once in a while, Don calls me up with a problem.
He called me up and said. Look, the colors aren't there.
So, what are you talking about?
In Excel 2003, we had this drop-down with 40 colors and my favorite colors are there.
I said. Don, these colors were hideous. No one likes these colors .
Well, I like those colors.
What do you mean they're not there?
When I go to this drop down, they're not there.
I don't have the right colors.
I said, No. They're all there, but instead of having 40 colors, you actually have 173 colors.
Well, which one is'nt?
Okay.
All right. So here's what you do.
Here's color number 1. And I said, we're going to go in, choose More Colors, go to Standard and right there, whatever is outlined is where you find that color.
All right, so I kind of started out with this.
Insert Shapes Line If you're looking for this color, it's way down there.
Sorry, it's off the screen and then I kind of kept doing this.
So, for the second color, you can see that the second color actually maps to here.
And the third color, maps from there to there.
And the fourth color, I thought its going to build this nice little workbook for Don.
And after adding all the colors, I realized, it was just horrible.
No one could ever figure out what's going on here.
All right. So, this workbook that I put together for Don.
If you like the old legacy colors and you like it, there are worksheets down there, 1 through 56, 1 for all of the colors.
And I will show you where to find it free, if you want it.
But then I said, all right, there has to be something better. So, what I did, let's just do Ctrl+N here.
I created this new add-in.
The color chooser add-in and check this out.
First of all, while the dialog is displayed, we can actually enter data.
That's a beautiful thing, right.
Excel 2010 doesn't support floating dialogues but this one floats.
If you want one of your old legacy colors, BAM! There it is.
And if you want to change the Font, choose Font, choose the color.
Or if you want borders, choose Line, choose the colors, let's go with the green and you get those borders. All right, isn't that cool?
So, I kind of put this together, Isent it to Don.
He said. Ah this is great! It solves my whole problem.
You should sell it, he said, you'd make a hell of lot of money.
And so I said. All right, let me, let me see if I can take a little bit better, because the real problem here is, that if someone was really smart in Excel 2003, they might have created custom colors in the workbook.
So, with More... here, there's actually, Excel 2003 dafault.
There's also, whatever, the custom colors happen to be in the active workbook, and then I figured, well, what the heck.
Let's go ahead and include the 40 different themes that are there in Excel 2010.
So, if you like this thing, how you actually have, you know, anything you need to do.
So, this is the legacy color chooser add-In. It's just a tiny little thing.
Took me a Saturday to write. So, I'm going to put it out on the website.
I don't know what, make it, 3, 4, 5 bucks, something like that'll be cheap.
If you love the old colors that you had in Excel 2003, and you don't want to have to deal with this horrible thing.
The legacy color chooser. Great way to go.
Want to thank Don, for sending that question in, and the 400 other questions, that he sent in, in the last week.
Want to thank you for stopping by. Will see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
Learn Excel from MrExcel podcast. Episode 1290 Legacy Colors Well, hey all right! Welcome back to the MrExcel netcast. I'm Bill Jelen.
A friend named Don, who just upgraded to excel 2010, kind of at my prompting, and so, once in a while, Don calls me up with a problem.
He called me up and said. Look, the colors aren't there.
So, what are you talking about?
In Excel 2003, we had this drop-down with 40 colors and my favorite colors are there.
I said. Don, these colors were hideous. No one likes these colors .
Well, I like those colors.
What do you mean they're not there?
When I go to this drop down, they're not there.
I don't have the right colors.
I said, No. They're all there, but instead of having 40 colors, you actually have 173 colors.
Well, which one is'nt?
Okay.
All right. So here's what you do.
Here's color number 1. And I said, we're going to go in, choose More Colors, go to Standard and right there, whatever is outlined is where you find that color.
All right, so I kind of started out with this.
Insert Shapes Line If you're looking for this color, it's way down there.
Sorry, it's off the screen and then I kind of kept doing this.
So, for the second color, you can see that the second color actually maps to here.
And the third color, maps from there to there.
And the fourth color, I thought its going to build this nice little workbook for Don.
And after adding all the colors, I realized, it was just horrible.
No one could ever figure out what's going on here.
All right. So, this workbook that I put together for Don.
If you like the old legacy colors and you like it, there are worksheets down there, 1 through 56, 1 for all of the colors.
And I will show you where to find it free, if you want it.
But then I said, all right, there has to be something better. So, what I did, let's just do Ctrl+N here.
I created this new add-in.
The color chooser add-in and check this out.
First of all, while the dialog is displayed, we can actually enter data.
That's a beautiful thing, right.
Excel 2010 doesn't support floating dialogues but this one floats.
If you want one of your old legacy colors, BAM! There it is.
And if you want to change the Font, choose Font, choose the color.
Or if you want borders, choose Line, choose the colors, let's go with the green and you get those borders. All right, isn't that cool?
So, I kind of put this together, Isent it to Don.
He said. Ah this is great! It solves my whole problem.
You should sell it, he said, you'd make a hell of lot of money.
And so I said. All right, let me, let me see if I can take a little bit better, because the real problem here is, that if someone was really smart in Excel 2003, they might have created custom colors in the workbook.
So, with More... here, there's actually, Excel 2003 dafault.
There's also, whatever, the custom colors happen to be in the active workbook, and then I figured, well, what the heck.
Let's go ahead and include the 40 different themes that are there in Excel 2010.
So, if you like this thing, how you actually have, you know, anything you need to do.
So, this is the legacy color chooser add-In. It's just a tiny little thing.
Took me a Saturday to write. So, I'm going to put it out on the website.
I don't know what, make it, 3, 4, 5 bucks, something like that'll be cheap.
If you love the old colors that you had in Excel 2003, and you don't want to have to deal with this horrible thing.
The legacy color chooser. Great way to go.
Want to thank Don, for sending that question in, and the 400 other questions, that he sent in, in the last week.
Want to thank you for stopping by. Will see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
