I am facing a strange problem in Excel 2007. Though i realize after reading some of your posts that you are not a big fan of Excel 2007 but still i know that nobody else can resolve this problem.

Problem Statement : I have around 10 worksheets in an Excel 2007 workbook. Each worksheet contains a table of fiscal data, based upon which a chart has been created on each worksheet. I have applied “Style 2″ to all charts for the sake of consistency. Now the problem is that on first two worksheets the color appear okay, as per the style. But in the later 8 worksheets, the colors appear very dim as if there was a sort of ‘transparency’ or some thing over it, which is blocking original colors to be displayed.

I have tried many options such as customizing styles, playing with colors, deleting / recreating charts, etc, but every time the exact same thing happens that after first two worksheets, the charts show dim colors, no matter what you do.

Thanks in advance. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Farooq

Alas, my perfect light gray for drawing subtle gridlines on the screen was invisible on my printer!?

I’m now using a lite version of your SFew2, where only your 21 most safely modded color indices vary from classic Excel defaults. It’s refreshing not to have any more chart series (barely) show up as yellow by default.

Thanks again for providing the Palette Chooser utility.

I also change the grays in the Excel 2003 color palette to lighter shades, and make the dark green a little less dark. Working with colors in 2007 is much easier and much harder all at the same time. It’s easier because you can choose any color, whether it’s in your theme or not. Harder because you can’t globally change a customized color by simply changing the color assigned to a color index.

I’d probably have used your Palette Chooser and/or the BonaVista utility toolbar(s) and/or the Color Brewer palettes routinely with Excel 2003 if they were compatible with my personal macros dating back to at least Excel 95 to format input cells and shapes my preferred ways — macros which need to work with default color indices. Especially a light yellow, which is 19, right?

It finally dawned on me that another perfectly adequate light yellow, NOT from the default fills, uses index 36. You’d been teaching the merits of changing the default fills and marker colors and leaving most of the other colors alone in classic Excel, and I hadn’t integrated that with how I use Excel . . . until today. Better later than never?