Add Great Color Combinations
To Excel, Word, PowerPoint
And Other Office Projects

by Charley Kyd
Microsoft Excel MVP

When you're trying to choose an Office color theme for a new project, Excel and other Office products provide virtually no information about how the colors might work together.

For example, suppose you're wondering whether Office's Essential color theme might work for a new project. The following image shows the only information that Excel and other Office products offer:

If you're a graphic artist, you might be able to imagine how these colors would fit together...along with their tints and shades. But if you're like most Office users, you don't have a clue. We need to **see** how the colors work together!

That's what one feature of Plaid Palette Plus is all about.

As you can see in the top-right corner of this page, one worksheet in the Plaid Palette Plus workbook shows 25 color combinations for any color theme when you hover your mouse pointer over its name in a list of color themes in Excel.

This view provides you 25 ideas about color combinations you might want to try, and combinations you definitely want to avoid.

To give you even more information, Plaid Palette Plus includes larger swatches with fills, text, and charts for each swatch.

This figure, for example, shows expanded color information for column B of the plaid palette above. The workbook includes a page like this for each column of colors in the plaid palette.

But that's not the only benefit that Plaid Palette Plus offers...

Standardized Theme Luminosity

This color palette is for the Office Angles color theme. Like any color theme, you can choose a lighter or darker value for each color in the theme.

However, take a look at the following table, which lists all the Office theme colors. As the middle column shows, the default luminosity (lightness or darkness) for each of the six Accent colors in each theme varies significantly from theme to theme, and from color to color within each theme. Only Adjacency and Apex offer consistent luminosity by default.

Here's why that variation is a problem: It keeps most Office color themes from being interchangeable.

For example, suppose you assign the Angles color theme, using both the right-most color (Accent 6) and the color next to it (Accent 5). As Default section of the table shows, Accent 6 for the Angles theme is a much darker color (the right-most bar is much shorter) than Accent 5.

Now suppose you want to switch to the Essential color theme again. With this choice, the luminosities are reversed. Here, Accent 6 is much lighter (the bar is much taller) than the Accent 5 color.

As you can see from this table, if you use any Office color palette other than Adjacency or Apex, each color combination you use will be uniquely light or dark. That's really bad, because once you use a color theme you're pretty much stuck with it. This is because if you switch color themes the colors in your workbook or other documents can randomly turn much darker or lighter, depending on the theme you choose.

The way to avoid this problem—the way to make all your color themes truly interchangeable—is to standardize your theme colors. Once the colors are standardized, they all have a consistent luminosity, as shown in the right-most column in the table.

You have two ways to standardize your color themes.

Plaid Palette Plus provides one way. It includes workbooks with a standardized palette for each Office color theme. That is, all colors in these palettes have the same luminosity values. To create a custom color theme from any of these workbooks, just activate it, choose Page Layout, Themes, Colors, Create New Theme Colors, and then enter the name for your custom theme in the dialog.

The Kyd Palette add-in provides the other way to standardize your color themes. One of its tools will standardize the colors of your current theme with the click of a button.

Another Kyd Palette tool offers 40,320 color combinations for each color theme.

Get Plaid Palette Plus Free!

For a short time only, you can get Plaid Palette Plus free when you order my new Excel add-in, Kyd Palette, for its introductory price that's 30% less than the normal price.

Click this link to learn more about Kyd Palette and get Plaid Palette Plus for free.

Get Plaid Palette Plus now and Save 29%!!

	I'm never satisfied unless you are more than satisfied. So here's my simple "no Small Print" guarantee. Try my add-in today and put it through the ringer. Use it in your reports and presentations for 12 months. You be the judge. If my add-in doesn't deliver everything I've promised, or if you're unhappy with it for any reason, just let me know and I'll immediately give you your money back. I have no problem making this iron-clad guarantee because I've used Excel from day 1; so I know my techniques work. Fair enough?	Terms and Conditions Availability: Guarantee: Licensing: Excel Version: Credit Cards: Instant download. One-year, unconditional. One work copy plus one personal copy. New Excel Only (Excel 2007 and after)