Comments on: A Color is Not Data

By: Rebecca

Rebecca — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:37:35 +0000

useful stuff. I always weep when people send these to me – now I don't have to!

By: Jim Cone

Jim Cone — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 01:00:43 +0000

Coloring data is not useful to those who have trouble distinguishing colors. Excessive use of colors is confusing on spreadsheets.
I wrote an add-in to assist in determining worksheet colors. It identifies… cell interior, cell pattern, font, border and sheet tab colors and does so for normal or conditionally formatted colors.
It only works in Excel versions prior to xl2007 (god bless Microsoft for their ability to force upgrades).
Colors displayed on the cell right-click menu – see a picture here… http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh247/James_Cone/DetermineColorsPicture.jpg
or
download it here (free)… http://excelusergroup.org/media/p/326.aspx

By: Kevin

Kevin — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 02:27:04 +0000

Conditional formatting is the mood ring for Excel. It works and if you are 30 past due you are red. It is emphasis. In word text is data where bolding and underlining are emphasis.
Just relax.

By: ross

ross — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:07:34 +0000

Dont going saying that sort of thing to visual management types!

By: Jayson

Jayson — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:06:51 +0000

But Mr. Pig: why would Excel let us sort by color if it isn't data?!!! Excel is always right, isn't it? This doesn't help any when people can seem to color things consistently. "Yes, the cell is orange, but it's not the same orange..." is a conversation I've had recently.

By: AlexJ

AlexJ — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 13:51:15 +0000

piggy: doesn't the colour of the bacon tell you whether its ready to eat or not? That sounds like more than metadata to me!

By: datapig

datapig — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 00:55:44 +0000

kzutter: A color can MAYBE be considered an attribute that can be used as meta-data. But that's as far as I go!

By: kzutter

kzutter — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:27:08 +0000

Actually, color is data.
color = information = data.

The problem here is that there is no distinction between the model and the view.

By: Rick Rothstein (MVP - Excel)

Rick Rothstein (MVP - Excel) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:51:51 +0000

Just to be perfectly clear about my wording, when I said this in my first message…

"True, you would have to do this for each color"

I meant for each DIFFERENT color, not for each cell with colored text; so, for the example from the blog, my macro would only have to be run 3 times, once for each color that was used… the macro takes care of finding all the similarly colored text and applying the description to them.

By: Christina Spradlin

Christina Spradlin — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:49:31 +0000

Another, low-tech, method is to sort or filter the data by font color (or cell color) (available in Excel 2007), then add a new column and enter the new description value and fill down for each category.

You've got to cut us code-phobes a break every once in awhile