Color Palette and the 56 Excel ColorIndex Colors

No wonder Excel graphs usually look like crap.   No 32 million color palette?

And who doesn’t use a color monitor with Excel these days?

Each Microsoft Excel workbook has a palette of 56 colors that you can apply to cells, fonts, gridlines, graphic objects, and fills and lines in a chart.  If you are using a color monitor, you can customize the shade and intensity of the colors in the color palette for each workbook.

Color Palette and the 56 Excel ColorIndex Colors

And some add-ons to get around this limitation.

http://color-palette.qarchive.org/

This step-by-step article explains how to change the color palette so that you can use custom colors for elements of the workbooks in Microsoft Excel. You can modify colors for many workbook elements, including the following elements:

• Worksheet Tabs
• Fonts
• Charts and chart elements
• Cells (fills and borders)

This article explains how to change the color palette so that you can use custom colors for these elements.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/288412

There’s some “interesting” challenges keeping color consistent between Excel and PowerPoint too.