Cell border colors should be changeable without having to respecify the
border lines for the cell.

To reproduce the problem, open excel and apply a thick border to any cell.
Now, click on the Format menu, then on "Cells..." then on Borders. Change the
color to red and hit Apply. The cell color is unchanged. Excel isn't smart
enough to apply the changes without you having to respecify the border lines
of the cell.

Cell border colors should change on the selected cells when applying a
border color change WITHOUT having to reapply new cell border lines! I don't
have to retype the text in a cell to change its color, so why should I have
to replace border lines to do the same? I seriously thought this was a bug,
then searched and found out how to change the color. I saw others on your
user group sites who were also confused.

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http://www.microsoft.com/office/comm...lic.excel.misc

Well, personally I'd call that a great feature! It allows you complete
flexibility for your cells. You can have a red double line on one side a
blue dotted line on the other a green feint line on top and a purple dashed
line on the bottom.
I can't think of a situation where I would need that much flexibility but
I'm glad it's there!!!

You make a good point. The problem isn't the flexibility, it's the behaviour
of the program. The way the program works now, it does nothing when users
apply this change. If users want four different colors on their cell borders,
fine, give them that flexibility, but don't fail to do anything at all when a
user has selected the cell, and changed a color setting, then has hit apply.
It appears that the program isn't working. At the very least, it could change
the color of all the borders!

If you had selected a cell with black text, then clicked on on the text
color and set it to red, and it failed, would you be bragging about the
flexibility of setting each letter to a different color? I don't think so.
This is a behaviour consistency issue. When an object is selected, and
attributes are changed, and the user hits Apply, the program fails if it does
nothing.

"MartinW" wrote:

Well, personally I'd call that a great feature! It allows you complete
flexibility for your cells. You can have a red double line on one side a
blue dotted line on the other a green feint line on top and a purple dashed
line on the bottom.
I can't think of a situation where I would need that much flexibility but
I'm glad it's there!!!

Still can't agree Rob,

After you click your color then click on the presets "outline" or "inside".

The funcionality you are asking for is already there at the cost of one
extra click.

It's a question of default behaviour and good design, not a lack of
functionality.

For example:
Select a cell, add some text, move off the cell, then reselect it, change
the color. It works.

Select a cell, add a border, move off the cell, then reselect it, change the
color. It doesn't work.

This is inconsistent behaviour.

When you open the font dialog in Excel, do you reset everything when you
only need to change the color? No. You touch only the attribute you want to
affect. If I have selected a cell that already has a border, it should be
clear to the programmer that a user selecting RED wants all four borders red
(as the default behaviour). That doesn't mean you can't allow other users to
have a pink top border, purple on the sides, and black dots on the bottom.
We're talking DEFAULT behaviour here.

If the functionality were consistent, I would have to change the color
attribute to red for the text, then go back and select the cell I wanted red!
Thank goodness it doesn't work that way!

If I select a cell with black text and then select text color red, I expect
to see the contents of the cell change color. If it didn't, I'd assume the
program wasn't working. And the fact that others have posted about this adds
weight to the idea.


"MartinW" wrote:

Still can't agree Rob,

After you click your color then click on the presets "outline" or "inside".

The funcionality you are asking for is already there at the cost of one
extra click.

Afraid I still can't agree,

You keep comparing fonts and borders as if they are similar, but they're
not. For colour purposes a set of text is one object and a border is four
separate objects.

You seem to think that the programmer should be able to read your mind and
know when you want those four objects to be treated as one. Well they didn't
bother trying to achieve that, they simply put it in as one of the options
available to you which you can achieve with one extra click.