Thursday, February 10, 2005

Using Excel to make pretty pictures

No I was just kidding - I can't really do that. I am not real flash at art. But you can probably use the autoshapes and some of those fancy colours to do something artistic if you were so inclined.

Andrew from Automate Excel has a great article on how to create "see through" shapes. Create 3D effects for cubes etc and more.

Charles Maxson over at Office Zealot has an explanation of how to edit your colour selection palette to some real nice effects.

Brief summary of steps

1. Print Screen the source to duplicate
2. Paste the clipboard contents into Microsoft Paint
3. Use the Color Picker tool to select the color you want to use
4. From the Edit Colors dialog (Colors | Edit Colors…), click the Define Custom Colors… button to expand the dialog to revel the color settings
Click here to see what I am talking about...

Once you have the important RGB color settings from MS Paint, toggle over to Excel and create a routine similar to the following one where you apply your custom color’s RGB coordinates to alter the workbook’s Color properties. Note that your top-down RGB numbers from Paint go left-to-right in Excel:

Private Sub EditColor()
ActiveWorkbook.Colors(17) = RGB(255, 204, 0)
ActiveWorkbook.Colors(18) = RGB(255, 230, 130)
ActiveWorkbook.Colors(19) = RGB(153, 204, 0)
ActiveWorkbook.Colors(20) = RGB(236, 233, 216)
ActiveWorkbook.Colors(21) = RGB(255, 0, 0)
ActiveWorkbook.Colors(22) = RGB(0, 0, 153)
ActiveWorkbook.Colors(23) = RGB(255, 255, 153)
ActiveWorkbook.Colors(24) = RGB(71, 108, 145)
ActiveWorkbook.Colors(25) = RGB(0, 128, 0)
ActiveWorkbook.Colors(26) = RGB(255, 128, 0)
ActiveWorkbook.Colors(27) = RGB(33, 139, 254)
ActiveWorkbook.Colors(28) = RGB(217, 64, 64)
End Sub

Link for one of Charle's Excel samples in living color...


Posted by: Jethro | 1:49 AM |