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Writer's pictureMiles Goodchild

The 56 standard colours in Excel - the ColorIndex values or pallet

Whilst you can use conditional formatting and cell fill etc. to give you almost any colour in excel there is a "special" set of 56 colours which Excel uses in custom formatting and other places. These are referred to by numbers 1-56. It is interesting and a little confusing that Excel will also allow the first 8 of these to be referenced by name, (Black, White, Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Magenta and Cyan). This is why you can see colour names in number formats such as £#,##0.00;[Red]-£#,##0.00 which shows negative finance numbers are red.

The complete list of all 56 colors (note the US version of colours) is shown below.


a full list of the 56 ColorIndex colours in Excel
List of colors

This list was generated using the code below. To use this simply open the VBA editor window (<ALT><F11>) and add a module to your workbook and paste in the code. You will need to save the file as a macro-enabled workbook.


Sub display_colours()

Application.ScreenUpdating = False

Application.Calculation = xlCalculationManual

Dim i As Long

Dim str0 As String, str As String

Dim x As Integer



On Error GoTo Finalise

'titles

Cells(1, 1).Value = "Color"

Cells(1, 2).Value = "HEX"

Cells(1, 3).Value = "Red"

Cells(1, 4).Value = "Green"

Cells(1, 5).Value = "Blue"

Cells(1, 6).Value = "RGB"

Cells(1, 1).EntireRow.Font.Bold = True



For i = 1 To 56

Cells(i + 1, 1).Interior.ColorIndex = i

Cells(i + 1, 1).Value = "[Color " & i & "]"

Select Case Cells(i + 1, 1).Interior.ColorIndex

Case 1, 3, 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 21, 23, 25, 29, 30, _

31, 32, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56

Cells(i + 1, 1).Font.ColorIndex = 2

Case Else

Cells(i + 1, 1).Font.ColorIndex = 1

End Select

str0 = Right("000000" & Hex(Cells(i + 1, 1).Interior.Color), 6)

Cells(i + 1, 2) = "#" & str0

Cells(i + 1, 3).Formula = "=Hex2dec(""" & Right(str0, 2) & """)"

Cells(i + 1, 4).Formula = "=Hex2dec(""" & Mid(str0, 3, 2) & """)"

Cells(i + 1, 5).Formula = "=Hex2dec(""" & Left(str0, 2) & """)"

Cells(i + 1, 6).Value = "RGB(" & Cells(i + 1, 3) & "," & Cells(i + 1, 4) & "," & Cells(i + 1, 5) & ")"

Next i

'autofit the columns

For x = 1 To ActiveSheet.UsedRange.Columns.Count

Columns(x).EntireColumn.AutoFit

Next x


Finalise:

Application.Calculation = xlCalculationAutomatic

Application.ScreenUpdating = True

End Sub


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