Wow!

Not what I expected to hear.

Thanks ... even if its bad news!

josh




"Jon Peltier" wrote in message
...
Josh -

Let me disabuse you of one notion. The color systems of Excel 2003 and
2007 are completely different and essentially incompatible. Don't assume
there's any magic in compatibility mode that will preserve custom colors
across versions. Compatibility mode means Excel won't try to put a value
into cell IW65537.

The Excel 2003 palette has 56 colors. Excel 2007 has a theme with (I
think) eight theme-related colors, from which eight sets of shades and
tints are available. You also have access to the rest of the 256^3 colors,
but unlike palette and theme colors, objects colored by these colors do
not all update if you change some kind of global color assignment.

Excel 2007 recognizes Excel 2003's palette, after a fashion. If a workbook
was assigned a customized palette in 2003, this custom palette is
recognized in 2007. However, the palette cannot be changed in 2007 (as far
as I can tell), and moving between versions is likely to break color
assignments.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
Peltier Technical Services, Inc. - http://PeltierTech.com
_______


"Josh Sale" <jsale@tril dot cod wrote in message
...
Thanks to everybody for their comments and suggestions. Rather than
replying to each individual posting let me try make a general response
here.

First, thanks for the general explanation of the palette. This helps
round out my mental model of how this stuff works and special thanks to
Jon for explaining the difference between using .Color vs .ColorIndex
(palette position vs "closest" color).


Second, let me add a bit more context about what I'm trying to do here.
The source workbook just contains formatting information ... its sort of
a template. The user can format that workbook to control how various
bits of data in the target workbook are formatted. So there is no
particular problem in copying the entire palette from the source workbook
to the target workbook (which I'm doing with assignment statement from my
original posting).


Third, I think the user formatted the target workbook under Excel 2007.
However the workbook was opened in compatibility mode so it would appear
that the palette continues to be limited to 56 colors and not 16m.


Fourth, when I test under Excel 2007, the first assignment statement
(TargetRange.Interior.Color = SourceRange.Interior.Color) seems to do the
right thing (the background color gets a kind of grey color) but the
second statement (TargetRange.Interior.ColorIndex =
SourceRange.Interior.ColorIndex) messes things up (the background color
becomes light yellow). The source interior Color is 14806254 and the
source interior ColorIndex is 19 which resolves to 13434879 when looked
up in the source palette.

Question 1: Wouldn't you expect the value of a cell's background Color
to equal that same cell's translated ColorIndex?


Fifth, when I test under Excel 2003 I immediately notice that the
background color of the cell in the source workbook has the light yellow
color (not the grey it had under Excel 2007). If I examine that cell, I
find that both its Color and translated ColorIndex are both equal to
13434879. So in this case, it doesn't matter what kind of assignments I
make in my code, I'm never going to get the grey and am always going to
get the light yellow.

Question 2: Given that the source workbook was saved in Excel 2007 in
compatibility mode, wouldn't you expect for the cells colors to be more
faithfully rendered in Excel 2003?


Thanks again for all of the help and suggestions.

josh





"Jon Peltier" wrote in message
...
And to further clarify the issue, in Excel 2003 and earlier, each
workbook has its own color palette. If you change the colors in one
workbook, it affects only that workbook. If the color palette in two
workbooks are different, then your code will not have the effects you
want. Assigning the color index from workbook A to workbook B merely
uses the color in the same position on the palette, whether they are the
same or not. Assigning the color from workbook A to workbook B uses the
color on the palette of workbook B that Excel decides is closest to the
color that is requested. Sometimes it's close, and sometimes it's way
off.

Only if the palettes are the same will either approach work reliably.
You could change the color palette of the target workbook, but that may
tick off the owner of the workbook.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
Peltier Technical Services, Inc. - http://PeltierTech.com
_______


"ShaneDevenshire" wrote in
message ...
Hi,

There is nothing wrong with the approach you are using, the problem
lies in
the custom color palette. Excel does not look at the color, it looks
at the
position of the color on the palette. One alternative would be to add
code
to set the color palette to the colors you want. This might irritate
the
users.

Excel 2003 supports 56 colors in the spreadsheet and therein lies the
problem. 2007 now supports something like 16 million.

Here is the code that sets a color using the RGB scale:

Sub AddColor()
ActiveWorkbook.Colors(27) = RGB(208, 255, 30)
End Sub

Notice what it does is replace the color at a given position in the
palette.
This means that where ever the user has used color 27 it will not be
this
new color.
--
Thanks,
Shane Devenshire


"Josh Sale" wrote:

I have what I think should be a very simple problem but I can't quite
puzzle
it out. Basically I want to copy the background color from one
arbitrary
cell to another arbitrary cell. I want this process to work even if
the
user has formatted the source cell using a color from a custom color
palette.

I currently have code that looks more or less like this:

If SourceRange.ColorIndex < xlNone Then
TargetRange.Interior.ColorIndex =
SourceRange.ColorIndex
TargetRange.Interior.Color = SourceRange.Color
End If

Mostly this seems to work OK. However sometimes it fails (that is the
wrong
background color appears). I think in these cases it because the
source
range has a custom background color.

Source and Target are always in different workbooks so I have a line
like
this in my code:

TargetRange.Parent.Parent.Colors = SourceRange.Parent.Parent.Colors

to try to copy the custom color palette from the source workbook into
the
target workbook.

I have to admit I'm fuzzy on difference between the Color and
ColorIndex
properties. I gather the former is an rgb value and the latter is an
index
into the palette. Do I need to copy both to get my colors? One?
Which
one?

TIA

josh