Get simple, powerful tips for making spreadsheet information more readable and understandable in Excel for Mac 2016.

Export Color Excel How To Emphasize Specific

Dennis Taylor shows how to emphasize specific cells with fonts, borders, and color; adjust the positioning of cell contents; format numeric data quickly; use conditional formatting; and add style and readability to worksheets.

Youll also learn how to add pictures to worksheets and discover power formatting techniquessuch as shortcuts and a quick copypaste techniquethat take the drudgery out of formatting even the largest amounts of data.

That will give you the folder path to the Theme Colors folder where you can drop in the xml files.

Color can be used to highlight and draw attention, but also to confuse.

As Maureen Stone once famously wrote, Color used poorly will obscure, muddle and confuse.

For me, using those default colors suggests a level of lazinessthat the creator couldnt bother to consider alternative colors to better display the data or convey their argument.

Fortunately, there are lots of creative people out there willing to provide you with samples, or at least a start.

For example, in two posts from Canva last year, they provided over 150 different color palettes derived from and photos and impactful websites.

In turn, Ive taken Pablos color palettes (thanks again, Pablo) and converted them into 150 files you can input into Excel for your own use.

In the left side of the Page Layout tab (and this applies to Excel 2010, 2013, and 2016 on PCs; Macs are a little different and I explain this in a Note below), there is a Themes group, which, among others options, contains a Colors dropdown menu (the images here are all from Excel 2013).

You may also notice at the very bottom that there is a Customize Colors option.

Selecting that option allows you to manually change each of the colors in the palette that you can save in an XML file format.

If you want to change those colors, see the Note at the end.).

Fortunately, this is the format Canva and Pablo provided, so I didnt need to do any converting.

Id be curious to know why that isif any of you Excel wizards know, please drop me a line.).

At least on Windows 7 computers, this Theme Colors folder can be found here.

I find the best way is to pretend you are going to save a new Theme and then copy the folder location.

So, in that same Themes group, use the drop-down menu under Themes and select Save Current Theme at the very bottom.

The folder location that will subsequently open should contain the Theme Colors foldercopy the folder location and drop the color palette(s) you want to use in there.

Be sure to browse the Canva posts to find a palette you like and then install the XML file.

Export Color Excel Zip File With All

You can download a zip file with all of the color palettes below; just unzip and use those you like best.

For whatever reason, you need to add the Theme Color file through PowerPoint.

You basically follow the same procedure described above, but go through PowerPoint and the color palette will then appear in Excel.

If you want to change the black and gray or any of the other colors, or you want to create your own palettes, heres how you do so.

Change this if you like and save the file (with the.xml extension) with that new palette name.

The black color palette is on line 11 (000000) and the gray on line 12 (8A8A8A8A).

Note that you dont need to include the hashtag in front of the code as is usually the case.

If you have an RGB palette that you need to convert to HEX, you can use a converter like this one from COLORRRS.) Save the file with the new name of the palette to the Theme Colors menu as described above.

Export Color Excel For Mac