ExcelBanter - 40 colors only displayed

Hi Katsche,

Excel uses 40 colours in cell formats, 8 as chart line colours, 8 as chart
fill colours. So if you click on the Fill Color button on the formatting
toolbar, you will only see 40 colours.
Strangely enough, you can still use the 16 colours reserved for charts to
format a cell colour - just use the FormatCellsPatterns menu.

According to Microsoft -
"In Microsoft Excel version 5.0 or 7.0, colors are arranged on the color
palette by color index. The first row of colors contains colors 1 through 8,
the second row contains colors 9 through 16, and so on.

In Excel 2000, colors are arranged on the color palette in chromatic order.
The first row contains the eight darkest colors, the second row is lighter
than the first and so on to the last row, which contains the eight lightest
colors."

Although my tests with changing the colour palette show that the 'chromatic
order' used by Excel can be a little difficult to figure out.

David McRitchie has a lot more information if you are interested
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/colors.htm

Ed Ferrero
Microsoft Excel MVP
http://www.edferrero.com

Hi,

I am pretty sure that Excel used to display 56 colors in the palette:
40 on the top and then separated by a line the remaining 16.

When I click on my icons now, it only shows the top 40 - the remaining
16 are gone. They do appear, however, in the Tools-Options-Color menu.

Does anybody know how I can have those 16 appear again?

Also, how does Excel count from 1-56, by column or by row, i.e. is
color 5 cell A5 or cell E1?

Thanks

Katsche