How do you make Excel use CMY colors instead of RGB colors?

[Jim Benet]

How do you make Excel use CMY colors (to match my printer) instead of RGB
colors?

 

[JP]

What are you trying to do? Maybe if you describe your goal, someone
here can provide a method better suited to the task.

--JP

 

[Jim Benet]

I used cell background colors (ie., fill colors) on my spread sheet. I
printed the sheet out on my Epson printer, but the colors where not exactly
the same. In the case of the yellow, they were way off. I know that the
printer uses CMY colors and Excel uses RGB colors. My question was how do
you make Excel use CMY colors instead of RGB. My goal is to make the colors
match.

 

[JP]

I don't think there is a direct way, but I found a converter on this
site:

http://local.wasp.uwa.edu.au/~pbourke/texture_colour/convert/

Red = 1 - Cyan
Green = 1 - Magenta
Blue = 1 - Yellow

So with your known CMY values, we can write a user defined function
that converts them to the RGB values you want, which you can use to
adjust the color selection for your filled cells.

Function ConvertToRGB(iCyan As Integer, iMagenta As Integer, iYellow
As Integer) As String

Dim iRed As Integer, iGreen As Integer, iBlue As Integer

iRed = 1 - iCyan
iGreen = 1 - iMagenta
iBlue = 1 - iYellow

ConvertToRGB = iRed & ", " & iGreen & ", " & iBlue
End Function

I'm not familiar with CMY values so if the results are not what you
expect, you should be able to tweak it appropriately. Let me know if
you need to know how to use the function.

--JP

 

[Jim Benet]

Thanks, JP. I think the "1"s should actually be 255, since the color scale
goes from 0 to 255 for each color.

Also, I believe the color palettes of CMY are not the same as RGB because
they combine differently on the printer. So the math functions you gave are
only approximate. For example, there could be combinations of RGB and can
never be duplicated in the CMY palette and visa versa. That is why I was
looking for a set up function in Excel that would change the color palette to
CMY-based.

Thanks again for researching this for me.

 

[JP]

It was just a guess, I just assumed that the information on that page
is correct. I know it's possible but wasn't sure exactly how to do it.
Feel free to tweak the algorithm until it produces the output you
want.

--JP