Excel formula to get cell color

Question

I would like to know if we can find out the Color of the CELL with the help of any inline formula  without using any macros   I m using Home User Office package 2010

User · Answer

No  you can only get to the interior color of a cell by using a Macro  I am afraid  It s really easy to do  cell interior color  so unless you have a requirement that restricts you from using VBA  I say go for it

User · Answer

Color is not data   The Get cell technique has flaws     It does not update as soon as the cell color changes  but only when the cell  or the sheet  is recalculated  It does not have sufficient numbers for the millions of colors that are available in modern Excel  See the screenshot and notice how the different intensities of yellow or purple all have the same number      That does not surprise  since the Get cell uses an old XML command  i e  a command from the macro language Excel used before VBA was introduced  At that time  Excel colors were limited to less than 60    Again  Color is not data   If you want to color-code your cells  use conditional formatting based on the cell values or based on rules that can be expressed with logical formulas  The logic  that leads to conditional formatting can also be used in other places to report on the data  regardless of the color value of the cell

User · Answer

As commented  just in case the link I posted there broke  try this   Add a Name any valid name  in Excel s Name Manager under Formula tab in the Ribbon  Then assign a formula using GET CELL function    GET CELL 63 INDIRECT  rc  FALSE    63 stands for backcolor  Let s say we name it Background so in any cell with color type    Background  Result    Notice that Cells A2  A3 and A4 returns 3  4  and 5 respectively which equates to the cells background color index  HTH  BTW  here s a link on Excel s Color Index

User · Answer

Anticipating that I already had the answer  which is that there is no built-in worksheet function that returns the background color of a cell  I decided to review this article  in case I was wrong  I was amused to notice a citation to the very same MVP article that I used in the course of my ongoing research into colors in Microsoft Excel   While I agree that  in the purest sense  color is not data  it is meta-data  and it has uses as such  To that end  I shall attempt to develop a function that returns the color of a cell  If I succeed  I plan to put it into an add-in  so that I can use it in any workbook  where it will join a growing legion of other functions that I think Microsoft left out of the product   Regardless  IMO  the ColorIndex property is virtually useless  since there is essentially no connection between color indexes and the colors that can be selected in the standard foreground and background color pickers  See Color Combinations  Working with Colors in Microsoft Office and the associated binary workbook  Color Combinations Workbook

[excel] Excel formula to get cell color

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