Today I am celebrating my 27th birthday. “not much left before thirty”, my wife playfully reminds me. “We still have 3 more years to go”, I said, thinking about all those things to do before I turn thirty list. All in all the year has been fantastic. We have moved to US for work reasons, I learned how to drive a car (on the roads that is), Got a mac, DSLR and iPOD nano, Started a small but fruitful business in India, Visited to New York and Niagara waterfalls, Overcame my fear of roller coasters, Became passionate about photography and excel, Came to know some of the coolest excel gurus in the world and Read all 7 books in the harry potter series. I hope this one turns out even better.
On to this weeks list of excel links.
14 misconceptions about charts and graphs
This excellent article by Jorge nails all the important charting misconceptions down. Make sure you read and understand this list before heading to make your next chart. My favorite is #2: You Should Master the (Technological) Tools of the Trade. While you need to know the technology enough to create good charts, great charts on the other hand come from you & your imagination.
9 steps to better chart formatting
Jon provides us with 9 simple yet very effective steps to create better charts. I have been thinking about writing on this for a while, but thanks to Jon, I don’t have to worry about it now.
When was the last time hidden cells created such issue? A formatting fubar in one of the excel spreadsheets containing contracts that are acquired by Barclays Capital from Lehman Brothers highlights the perils of hidden cells. We all know that you can hide a row / column in excel by right clicking on the row / column header and selecting hide option. Make sure you tell about the hidden cells when you share your work with others.
Handling CSV files when the content has genuine commas
CSV files are a popular way to share tabular data. You can use them in Excel without thinking twice. But what if you need to create CSV for content that has commas already in it? Daily Dose of Excel provides us with some VBA to handle delimiters in CSV files.
Don’t forget about the A in VBA
This article by Stephane Viot, a Program Manager at MS Excel Team, reminds us about the Automation part of VBA. We all try to solve uncommon problems in Excel by using little VBA wizardry. But often we leave the last steps for manual processing. The article addresses one such problem (extracting unique cells from a range) and tells us how we can automate the whole thing.
Earlier Excel Links:
Excel Links – Mt. Rainier Edition
Excel Links [Oct 6]
Excel Links – Complete Archive
Want to share a link? Use the comments form below or mail me at chandoo.d at gmail.com
17 Responses to “Custom Number Formats – Colors”
You are right, Chandoo. I was playing with the colour numbers last week and some of them don't appear different from each other. Others are totally different from yours.
@Duncan
Each version of Excel, post 2003, renders colors slightly differently
Different language versions may also have different default color palettes
Hello in french
excel 2010
colo1 = couleur1 = black
[couleur1]; [couleur2]; etc..
@Hui, thank you very much again for this great post.
However - under Excel 2007, Hungarian version your solution does not work with color names. I've tried both English and Hungarian names, but drops an error message "not valid formats"
Do you have any idea how to solve this issue?
thanks in advance
@Andras
Without a Hungarian version of Excel 2003 I don't think I can assist
Have you tried using the colour numbers? I couldn't get the names to work (despite using an english version of excel). but it did work with the numbers though. I left out the "u" and was easily able to produce burgundy using [color9]
Here a possible solution: find an English version of Excel, write there the formats using English names, then open the file in the Hungarian version and see the translation.
In Excel 2007 I can't get the colour names to work e.g Sea Green but the numbers do e.g color3 - colour3 does not work so I must bow to the country that has stolen my language (ha ha!)
Hey chandoo, nice Tip!
Wouldn't be easier just apply some conditional formatting for negative numbers and another for positive numbers? Or there's some cases that you can't do that?
Unfortunately the TEXT function doesn't color the cell as number formatting does.
Hi Hui,
Great post Sir, love the new way of formatting with color numbers.
I am using 2007, and it leads me to the last color number 56.
Thanks Hui.
[…] explains how to set up custom number formats with a wide array of […]
Thanks Hui - works a treat!
Thank you, very helpful.
Trying to figure out if it is possible to apply color only to a part of the cell?
E.g. I have a value formatted as Accounting with a currency symbol.
Those I find somewhat distracting though necessary. If I could make them less obtrusive by coloring them gray while the number would stay black, that would be great. Tried tinkering with the format string, but didn't get the desired result. Single color for complete cell value works, but coloring just part of it could not be achieved. Maybe somebody managed that?
Exactly what I was looking for - thank you!
colour in the Australian doesn't work - we have to go American and no problem.
I always thought is was 56 colours notice you have 57. Cool.
thanks
Analir Pisani
Customised Microsoft Office Training Specialist
Sydney - Australia
http://www.azsolutions.com.au
Thank You!