Changing *permanently* Excel's colors and graph fill for charting?

Is there a way of changing the default chart colors *permanently* so
that every *new* workbook has them?

I know about, but should not have to go through the manual nonsense
each time of copying the chart colors from another workbook. In other
words, I would like the color sequence for lines and fills to be part
of the normal Workbook template, so that charts automatically take on
my prefered colors. How can one do that?

Second, and this one truly bugs me, is that Excel fills in the
background of charts (the fill area) with dull grey. (What a
ridiculous choice on aesthetic grounds! What a bad user-interface
design that we seem stuck with it as the default for new workbooks!) I
would like to stop it from doing that and instead have each new chart,
in any new workibook, come up with the fill being white! Again, I
know about creating a chart and then making it the default for *that*
workbook, but I shouldn't need to do that each time for each new
workbook!

This is 2006, folks, and I cannot believe that Excel still cannot do
these things, still cannot save the user prefered colors and fills in
the basic template. I am hoping that I am simply wrong about all this
and that there's some obvious solution I've overlooked or have not
found on the net.

Even if Excel doesn't have a way of doing these things, perhaps there
is a way of hacking the default color and fill scheme. I know that
each upgrade of Word I run the Resource Editor and change the color of
the paragraph markers to red so that they will show up distinctly when
I reveal formatting marks.

Well, I figured out one thing-- I think!

I copied a small data set into a new workbook, created a graph, and
then changed the colors using Excel Preferences Chart Fills and Chart
Lines.

I then saved this as a template named "Workbook" in the Office Startup
Excel folder replacing the default workbook template.

Of course, that means every new document comes up with the small
dataset and chart. So I reopened the default Workbook and deleted the
data and the chart and re-saved it. Voila! It seems that I now have
chart colors and bar fills in the colors I'd prefer.

But that still doesn't get rid of the awful grey background. Note:
when one changes the Chart Fills colors that really is changing the bar
fills, not the actual background fill. (The Excel lingo should be
changed in that box.)

So, I've solved, I think, the colors problem... but how does one change
that ugly, dark, miserable grey fill?

Well, lo and behold, I repeated the same sequence, but this time also
changing the background fill to white, and saving that chart as a
custome user-defined chart and made it the default chart.

I then saved it as the default workbook. This part has been tricky as
when you change the type to Template, Excel jumps to the My Templates
folder, which isn't where you want to save this!

Instead you must navigate back to Office, Startup, Excel, and save the
template Workbook replacing the one that's there.

I then re-opened that template, deleted the data set and chart again,
and re-saved it.

So far, whenever I open a new workbook and create a graph, it has the
colors I chose and the background fill is white or None (whichever it
was that I selected!).

It should all be much easier-- one should be able to do all this within
the Excel preferences dialog box with a choice to save colors, bar
fills, and chart background fill as the default. But, at least, it can
be done!

Hope all this "ranting", rambling, and rummaging helps someone else!