Excel colour display

I've noticed a change today in how Excel displays colours.

I have a spreadsheet which I use to manage my personal finances and in the totals, I display negative balances in red and positive in blue. Now it displays both in blue as which are controlled by conditional formatting. I checked the conditional formatting rules (which have not changed). I've noticed other colour changes in the same workbook. I loaded a backup version from a few days ago to check and I get the same behaviour. It appears there has been some background change to Excel - has anyone noticed similar behaviour?

Thanks and mildly annoyed.

busdriver12 said:

I've noticed a change today in how Excel displays colours.

I have a spreadsheet which I use to manage my personal finances and in the totals, I display negative balances in red and positive in blue. Now it displays both in blue as which are controlled by conditional formatting. I checked the conditional formatting rules (which have not changed). I've noticed other colour changes in the same workbook. I loaded a backup version from a few days ago to check and I get the same behaviour. It appears there has been some background change to Excel - has anyone noticed similar behaviour?

Thanks and mildly annoyed.

Click to expand...

Not sure which version of EXCEL you have but try going into Account --->properties and there's things you can change. It might help.

Cheers
jimbo

Thanks for the reply Jimbo. I am using MS 365 which updates on the fly as required.

I've done a little more digging and it feels like something in the code was altered which caused this issue. I looked at the font colour in one of the affected cells (right click|format cells|font) and was set to white (Hex FFFFFF) but was being displayed in a green/brown colour.

I had a simlar issue with cell comment colouring for which I use VBA code to set from the default. The font colour being used was using ColorIndex value of 11 which is a blue colour, but was being displayed in same green/brown colour (mentioned above). After some research of VBA varibles/constants, I changed this value to 5 which solved the problem. I've no idea why this occurred, but I have the outcome I was seeking and am now happy with this.

As for the cells being controlled conditional formatting, I found that clearing and resettting the rules fixed that particular problem.

You may ask why I am making such a big deal about the colours? It's because I am colour blind and need to use colours which I have no issues in seeing. I now consider this problem solved. I am not a developer so have no desire to dig any deeper and I hope this helps anyone else in a similar situation.

Phil