Can't figure out which cell is highlighted...

[Nathan Dornbrook]

Is there any way to change the highlight color for an individual cell from
very pale blue to something easier to see?

Does anyone else find this a problem?

It drives me nuts. I use Office 2004 on my Mac for everything else, and
after a few months usually forget why I'm using OpenOffice to view Excel
spreadsheets and try to switch back - only to discover that Excel is still
unusable. Very frustrating.

 

[Nathan Dornbrook]

Hey, guys; found the answer by looking at an earlier post in this very forum.

Excel takes the highlight color from the system preferences, so there's no
way to change it without affecting the behaviour of highlighted text system
wide, which is a bit of a pain, since what's readable in word and firefox
isn't what's readable in Excel.

What a bother! Who designs applications this way? Very frustrating.

 

[JE McGimpsey]

What a bother! Who designs applications this way? Very frustrating.

Personally, I like XL looking Mac-like in that way, and it's been that
way for many versions. However, lots of people don't.

Take a look at Chip Pearson's RowLiner add-in:

http://cpearson.com/excel/rowliner.htm

or, if you use colored backgrounds in your cells, my technique can

http://mcgimpsey.com/excel/highlightrow.html#HiLiteRetainColor

be generalized to work in more than one workbook.