Excel 2003 colour compatibility tool

[Geoff59]

A previous thread refers to compatibility in Excel 2007/2012 with colours when saving in Excel 2003 format.
Refer http://www.excelforum.com/excel-gene...html?p=2994859 (Thanks to Andy Pope).

I have modified the fill colour picker tool in this thread to add:

• Font Colour picker tool
• Checker tool to identify non-conforming cells

To use the attached tool as an add-in, open in Excel 2007/2010, and use Save As, Excel Addin .xlam. This should save the file as an add-in (ColourTool.xlam) in the correct folder for your installation.

Then in Excel, use Excel Options, Add-ins, Manage Excel Addins, and tick ColourTool.

This will add a tab "2003 Colours" which contains three items - one to choose an Excel 2003 fill colour, one to choose an Excel 2003 font colour, and one to check the current worksheet or all worksheets in the current workbook for compatibility with Excel 2003.

The first two provide a pallet to choose a fill or font colour.

The Checker tool will check all cells in the worksheet/workbook and list in a new workbook the address of any cells with fill or font colour not compatible with Excel 2003. This list will show the worksheet, address and offending colour values with the cell formatted with these colours, so you can see at a glance which cells are incorrect.

This is a useful tool to overcome that annoying message when you develop a spreadsheet in Excel 2007 or 2010 and save it in Excel 2003 format (*.xls) because you need to share it with users in an Office 2003 environment.


Geoff