Hi There
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Executive Summary: Is there a way I can force excel to retain the exact
background colors of cells when I paste them between documents?
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I have a series of reports in separate files where each row has a cell with
a color-coded background. The color is based on whichever group a record in
that row belongs to.

We receive these reports weekly, leading up to an event that happens every
couple of months. This event is attended by around 50 people and these 50
people are divided into any number of groups.

Because there is no limit to the number of possible groups (and the group
ids are continuous between events), the color-coding is generated
programatically. In practice, my users will only be working with 5 or 6
groups at a time over seven or eight documents - so the likelyhood of a
color-clash is slim to none.

The color is generated by hashing the group id and truncating the result
down to six characters. This gives us a Hex value that we can use as the
color code for that group.

The problem comes when you copy all the rows from one report and go to paste
them into the master report. The background colors all snap to the color
pallete of the master document - which creates clashes all over the place.

Obviously, because the color-code can be any color at all and is generated
programatically, I can't just assign groups to a known color pallete -
because a clash using that method is far more likely.

Is there a way I can force excel to retain background colors of cells when I
paste them between documents?

Thank you very much in advance for your time and kind consideration.

Iain Fraser