Color management for Excel Charts

[water]

Is anyone familiar with the color management of Excel with charts? Is there any good reading you can recommend?

MSDN just gives a listing of all objects, methods and properties but no explanation how they are related and how to use them?

Properties like Color, ColorIndex, SchemeColor, ObjectThemeColor, ThemeColor confuse me a bit.

Any hint is greatly appreciated.

Edited December 10, 2011 by water

[taietel]

water, you can find some usefull stuff here (check the pdf link).

[water]

Taietel, thanks for the reply.

The pdf is a quite good reading and gives a lot of information what color to use for which purpose.

Where I need information is how to use the COM objects, methods and properties.

Color: lets you specify the color as red, green, blue values

ColorIndex: lets you specify the color as a number from 0-56 of the current color palette.

SchemeColor: When I want to color a fill I have to use SchemeColor (values from 0-56) but it seems to use a different color palette because I get different colors compared to ColorIndex.

So I need a good reading explaining how to use the different methods and properties. It should explain Excel 2007 and Excel 2010.

Thanks

Edited March 22, 2013 by water

[taietel]

Oh, now I get it. Look here: http://dmcritchie.mvps.org/excel/colors.htm

[water]

Thanks a lot! Exactly what I need to start. Will keep me busy for quite some time.

Do you know of something similar for Excel 2007 and later? I know that Microsoft made big changes to the charting engine after Excel 2003. Charts created in Excel 2003 or earlier look completely different in Excel 2007 (in respect of colors). Themes were added so there are a lot of possibilities in the newer versions of Excel.

The findings will go into our ExcelChart UDF. As soon as we understand how colors are handled by Excel 2007 and Excel 2010 we will release the first alpha of our UDF.

[taietel]

I've tested this with Excel 2010 and it's ok (bar chart). See if it helps.

[water]

Thanks, I will give it a try tomorrow.