Hey, welcome back to Mr. Excel net cast, I’m Bill Jelen. Well today’s idea comes from Harry. Harry is a student at 0020 College in Kent Missouri. I was invited out to do a seminar this past Saturday there in Missouri and I was doing the class in Excel 200 because most of the student had an Excel 2007 and I talked about group mode. I was mentioning how frustrated I was with the way that they highlight things in Excel 2007. Let’s look down here at the bottom of the screen.
You can see that January February March are in the group mode. April May and June are not and like I play with Microsoft is that they make those colors almost identical. Same thing were if you have data that selected, lets look up here the difference between A3 which is not in the selection and C3 which is in the selection is almost identical and if not like it was in Excel 2003 back in Excel 2003 there was definitely a color difference, very clearly from white to dark blue and the tab colors down here, the selected tabs were in white and the unselected tabs were a little bit more gray. So I pull this numbers in the photo shop and actually got the RGB values of everything and sure enough there is a huge change from 2003 to 2007.
In 2003 the unselected cells had this values and the selected cells have this values which was on average of 19 change in hue as we went from selected unselected. Well in 2007, they’ve really narrow that range down. It’s on average 6.7% change in hue which really for me is not enough to tell the difference. Same with thing with the tabs, its use to be a 70% change in color from unselected to selected and now they brought this back to 6.3. And you know so during my seminars I love to complain especially when Microsoft does something that I don’t think was the best thing to do and one of the students Harry raise his hands and said look just change the tab numbers. And sure enough in 2007 if we will adopt different colors so right click tab color and you’re going to choose red or green or whatever you want to do. Well now its very obvious which items are selected and which items are unselected and because you have the dark green for the unselected and the basically white now with just a bit of green for the selected so that’s a great solution.
Now in a previous podcast we talk about how to customize all future work books. It might be a good idea to go through and set u p a template where your tab colors are not to default of white change it to some other color and then at least you’ll be able to tell selected versus unselected. Still have a good solution for the situation here where the selected cells are basically the same colors the unselected cells. You know I try basically extending Harry solution to use a different color as the background and I lose the grid line that wasn’t extremely happy with that result. Its still very close the bright yellow for the unselected and the slightly muted yellow for the selected so I want to say thanks out to Harry and all of the students at Stanford College for hosting me on Saturday in this cool idea for Excel 2007. If any of you watching this podcast, if come up with a better to see the selected verses unselected cell in Excel 2007 please feel free to drop me note Bill@MrExcel.com.
Well thanks for stopping by, we’ll see you next time for another net cast from Mr. Excel.
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