Markus,

If you have a default palette Tom is most certainly right.
Your very pale lilac will be mapped to the nearest colour
which is white (colorindex 2). Instead try:

Activeworkbook.colors(15) = RGB(238, 241, 252)

Colorindex(15) is applied to the Plot area by default (not
same as "automatic"), light grey in an uncustomized
palette. Plot areas in new charts, as well as those to
which you have not applied another colour, will adopt your
customized colour. Of course you could customize any
other palette colour and apply that instead.

Cell and Chart colour formats can only accept palette or
automatic colours (system black & white).

The "Chart fill" colours Tom referred to are applied both
by default and as automatic colours to series that can be
filled. Linked to series / color index orders starting at
1 & 17 respectively, and not limited to 8.

Regards,
Peter T

-----Original Message-----
Just a guess. Colors are restricted to the 56 colors
defined in the
palatte. If you assign an RGB color, it is mapped to the
nearest color in
the palatte. If you go to Tools=Options, color tab, you
see there are only
8 colors listed for chart fill. Perhaps your color is
being mapped to white
as the closest.

--
Regards,
Tom Ogilvy

Markus Grein wrote in message
-
online.net...
by the way ... that's Excel 2k under Win2k ...


"Markus Grein" wrote in message
-
online.net...
Hello everyone ! :)

Maybe someone can help me with a problem :

I am trying to assign a custom color to the plot area
of an Excel chart
programmatically. So, I define a long variable
(cCol51&) and assign the
RGB
values as usual :

cCol51 = RGB(238, 241, 252) <<

....




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