Reverse engineer colour

Hi all,

I have a lot of a spreadsheet set up using a lot of a theme colour (background2, darker 50%). This includes backgrounds borders, some text etc.
I want to change all of this to a new colour, but if I change the theme to the correct new colour, then all the cells are the new colour but darkened by 50% and therefore wrong.

I therefore need to reverse engineer a starting theme colour so that when darkened by 50% it gets to the colour I would like.

Any suggestions around what to do please? Use VBA property .tintandshade? But by what amount (0.33333, 0.3, 0.5)? Or is there something else I can do?

I'm using excel 2011.

Thanks Domc

Hi domc,

In Excel 2007 Microsoft introduced 'Tint and Shade' and a lot of other fancy color attributes, which I try to ignore. I am just interested in colors. I use the following macros to determine colors of Shapes and Cells. I prefixed 'aaa' in front of the Macro names so they would be at the top of the list when I press 'Alt F8' to display Macros.

Excel 2011 is for the Mac, so I do not know if the following Windows Macros will work for you.

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To access Visual Basic (VBA) see:
http://www.ablebits.com/office-addin...a-macro-excel/
a. Click on any cell in the Excel Spreadsheet (may not be needed).
b. ALT-F11 to get to VBA.
c. CTRL-R to get project explorer (if it isn't already showing).
d. Double Click on a 'Module Name' in 'Project Explorer' to see code for that module.

4. To add a module in the VBA Editor:
a. 'Left Click' on any cell in the Excel Spreadsheet.
b. ALT-F11 to get to VBA.
c. CTRL-R to get project explorer (if it isn't already showing).
d. 'Right Click' on the Project or on any module in 'Project Explorer'.
e. Insert > Module
f. To rename the Module press 'F4' to access the 'Properties' Window (if the 'Properties' Window is not already visible)
g. To the right of the (Name) Property, type in the New Name. The name MUST be unique and VBA must be DORMANT (i.e. no Macros running).

You can now 'cut and paste' code into the module.

It is a best practice to declare all variables. If you misspell a variable in your code, VBA will silently assume it is a Variant variable and go on executing with no clue to you that you have a bug. Go to the VBA development window, click Tools, Options, and check "Require Variable Declaration." This will insert the following line at the top of all new modules:

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This option requires all variables to be declared and will give a compiler error for undeclared variables.

I hope this helps.

Lewis

Hi Marvin,

Yes you're right in that you can change the theme colours - which i've done and imported.

However, if you look on the colour grid, you have various shades (lighter or darker) of these theme colours.

As the colour I'm trying to change is a 50% darker version of tan, when I bring in the specific colour I want as a theme, it is then darkened by 50% and is therefore not the right colour.
[Hence trying to reverse engineer the colour which, when darkened by 50%, would actually be the colour I want.
If it was a small amount of cells it would be easy to just reapply, but it's literally thousands of different backgrounds, borders and some text which has been assigned to this colour.

Thanks for all your comments Lewes but would prefer to use the themes if I can.