A Simple Way to Add New Life to that Drab Excel Spreadsheet

When you look at an Excel spreadsheet it can look like...well...quite frankly it can look like a big endless field of black and white boxes. Sure you could use the built in shading system and have endless rows of actual black and white, or grey and white, or maybe even red and white. None of these color schemes really sound thrilling to anyone though. After a while of staring at those endless rows, a person could conceivably start to have visions of flamingos or peacocks strutting around the monitor preening themselves just so you can see color again.

At first glance, there seems to be not a thing that you can do about this. After all, there are only so many features that the designers of the Excel program put into it, and you can't go around just adding your own features into the program now can you? Well, you can (in a way). If you add a "plug in" to the program then you can add extra features without having to go to school and get a degree in computer programming. Plug ins are small programs that will either add new features to an existing program or, as in the case of this one, will enhance a specific feature or set of features that are already present in a program.

The plug in that will be helping us to make your Excel files pop to life with a custom color scheme is called ‘Color Manager for Excel' and it allows you to make custom color pallets in your program very simply. Once the program is installed, you can insert a new pallet into your program by selecting it from the drop down menu. That way you can use custom company colors, or anything else that suits your needs.

So, now that you know how to get your hands on the plug in, how to get it onto your computer system and some basics about using it, there is no end to the fun that you can have with the color schemes of your spreadsheets. Go ahead and have a pink and blue spreadsheet, or shades of green, or go for a fire color spread all yellow and orange. Go on, get as creative with things as you feel that your company's culture will allow. Just use your best judgment.