Testing colours of Cells in Excel

[tpsmith]

Hi

Is there any way to test the colour of a cell within Excel.
The colour of the cell not the text in the cell, suppose both would be handy though.

Explanation: We have highlighted certain rows of a spreadsheet in different colours to help identify certain records, we would now like to sort those and group them.

The only way I can think of doing it is creating another field and say something along the lines of:

if Cell A1 = Red then value = 1 or
if Cell A2 = Blue then value = 2

We could then sort on this value.

 

[gizmo1973]

There is a free add in called ASAP utilits that will sort by cell colour.

http://www.asap.com

Regards, Phil.

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[tpsmith]

Hi gizmo1973,

thanks for the post but I am afraid i cannot seem to find it. If you have a more direct link it would be greatly appreciated.
Regards
Tony

 

[gizmo1973]

My mistake it should be

http://www.asap-utilities.com/

The go to download ASAP utilities

Regards, Phil.

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[xlbo]

I would like to point out though that this is a workaround and a good example of why you should not use colour to identify records in excel. There are no inbuilt features to reference colours - it can only be done through VBA.

It is generally a better idea to use an extra column and mark the rows with numeric or Alpha/Numeric markers to identify them

You can then use conditional formatting or just standard colour filling to make them visually representative but you can use the markers to filter / sort on etc

Rgds, Geoff

"Three things are certain: Death, taxes and lost data. Guess which has occurred"

Please read FAQ222-2244 before you ask a question

 

[gizmo1973]

What Geoff said goes for me too!
I came across ASAP and Dig DB (another handy tool) becasue users who would not listen to the above advice which is very important.

Regards, Phil.

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[tpsmith]

Superb Thanks, lots of toys to play with