"Amedee Van Gasse" wrote in message
...

I have two additional questions on this subject:

1. Is there some "deep wizardry" to change this programmatically? If
need be with API calls or the casting of elvish runes?

Not sure what you mean by deep wizardy, but you can set a colour
programmatically very easily

Activeworkbook.Colors(3) = RGB(0,0,255)

changes colour 3, which is usually red, to blue. As I am sure that you can
see it can be any hue between white and black by using the relevant RGB
value.

2. Is this a global setting, or per file?

It is per file. The way to make it global is to open Book.xlt from the
start directory and modify that and save it. Any new books then assume this
value.