Excel has long had a feature allowing you to add background shading to cells, but if you use non-standard colours then replicating them can be fiddly. Excel 2010 makes that process easier with a simple but obvious tweak: a list of recently-used colours on the Fill drop-down (the small bucket) in the Ribbon.
I suspect this isn't a new feature and was also in Excel 2007, but I've only just noticed it since I normally access the Fill option using the even more venerable Control-1 keyboard shortcut for Format Cells. That's more keyboard-friendly and also makes it easier to tweak related options such as borders, but the access to recently-used colours is worth noting if you do a lot of shading.
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I use it all the time in Office 2007 because of one weird quirk - The standard Office theme (or any of the other themes) don't have primary colours of blue and green. They have a nice blue and green, but they are not pure.
Yeah, just a shame it doesn't save the recent colour list when you close Excel/Powerpoint.
We have a strict corporate palette of colours, and the only way we've been able to work around our needs for a customised palette is to create a bunch of chart templates with our scheme..
I don't know if this helps Burnie. I can't remember what happens in Office 2007, but in Office 2010 you can save a colour scheme that is then available without dealing with charts.
In Excel: the Page Layout tab includes both Colours and Themes in the top left corner.
...Geoff
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