WHY DID THE COLORS CHANGE IN EXCEL 2013?

Strategy: Go the Excel 2013 Page Layout tab. Skip the Themes dropdown. Go to the Colors dropdown and choose Office 2007-2010.

Figure 1211 Use this color theme.

WHERE ARE MY EXCEL 2003 COLORS?

Problem: We always used the orange fill from the third row second column of the Excel 2003 color drop- down. Where is this in Excel now?

All Excel 2003 colors can be found in Excel today, However, when you get to More Colors, you will although it might be difficult to find. Open one of find that the good old 40 colors are mixed in with the color dropdowns. This dropdown now shows 133 other colors. The tough part is figuring out the theme colors, plus a few basic colors. Skip those which one of these colors is the color that you want. and go to More Colors.

Figure 1213 All of the 40 colors are in here, some- Figure 1212 More Colors has the old colors where.

I’ve created a workbook with forty worksheets. Each worksheet draws a line from the old legacy dialog to the new dialog, so you can find where the color is located. I wrote a tiny little add-in that brought the old legacy color dropdown back to Excel. If you love the old Excel colors, the add-in is available for just $3 from http://www.mrexcel.com/coloraddin2010.html.

TRANSFORM BLACK-AND-WHITE SPREADSHEETS TO COLOR BY USING A TABLE

Problem: My worksheet is boring black and white. I want to jazz it up with color.

Strategy: Format the range as a Table. Use the Table Styles gallery to format the spreadsheet. Here’s how you do it:

1. Select one cell in your range of data. Press Ctrl+T or select Insert, Table icon.

2. Excel asks to confirm the location of your table and indicate if there are headers. Click OK.

Figure 1214 Accept the table range.

3. A new Table Tools Design ribbon tab appears. Use the Table Styles gallery, in conjunction with the Table Style Options check boxes to format your table.

FIT A SLIGHTLY TOO-LARGE VALUE IN A CELL

Problem: I just printed 10 copies of the 20-page report for a meeting. Some numbers printed as ##### instead of num- bers.

Strategy: Excel shows the ### when the number is too big for the cell. But, numbers will sometimes fit on the screen and not fit when you are printing.

Figure 1216 Annoying [pound, hash, or number] signs.

To solve this problem, you can use Excel’s Shrink to Fit option. To use it, you select the numeric columns. Press Ctrl+1 to access the

Format Cells dialog. On the Alignment tab, you choose Shrink to

Fit from the Text Control section.

Results: The cells will be displayed in a smaller font when they

become too wide for the column. This is preferable to having the Figure 1217 Choose Shrink to Fit. numbers displayed as ######.

Figure 1218 The small font for 10,205,685 is preferable to #####.

TURN OFF WRAP TEXT IN PASTED DATA

Problem: I regularly paste information from Web pages, and I am frustrated by the way Excel wraps text in cells. Below, , column A is not wide enough for the date, and column B is wrapped so that you can see only a few rows on the screen. Using AutoFit to make the columns wider will not work when the cells have their Wrap Text property turned on.

Figure 1219 Data pasted from the Web often has Wrap Text turned on.

Strategy: Follow these steps to correct the Problem:

1. Select all cells by pressing Ctrl+A. The cells in your selection will contain some cells with Wrap Text turned on and some cells with Wrap Text turned off. Click Wrap Text on the Home tab to turn on

Wrap Text cell for all cells. Click Wrap Text again to turn off the property for all cells. Each row will now be a normal height, and you can see more cells, but you still need to make the columns wider.

2. Select Home, Format dropdown, AutoFit Column Width.

Figure 1220 The pasted data now has normal formatting.

DELETE ALL PICTURES IN PASTED DATA

Problem: I copy data from my bank’s Web page into Excel. On the Web page, the bank has little check icons that let me view a physical copy of a check. These check icons show up as annoying im- ages in my Excel workbook. How can I delete all these images in one step?

Figure 1221 Delete all images.