With the advent of Yosemite, the Mac color picker has acquired color management. While this may be a godsend to users in a color-management workstream, everyone else is put in a tough spot. You can't create accurate color values for apps that are not color-managed, which is the majority. This isn't such a big deal in, say, BBEdit, where the color only has to be close. But for corporate presentation software like PowerPoint, it's a disaster. It's simply impossible to set accurate corporate RGB colors in a presentation.
You can see this in action if you have PowerPoint on a Mac. Open it up, select any text or shape and set the color. RGB Sliders is the place to do this. Enter R50 G100 B200, then click on OK. Now, reopen the color panel: the values have changed! Continuing the test, enter R50 G100 B200 again. Click on the gear icon beside the RGB Slider dropdown and select a different color profile. The color values change before your very eyes! Yikes!
Change Background Color Word 2011. Discussion in 'Mac Apps and Mac App Store' started by SHADO, Nov 25, 2010. In these situations, where only the color wheel appears, you can switch to a different color picker tab and enable the CMYK or RGB input. This article is for those who need to use the RGB option for specific color selections in PowerPoint for Mac. Method #1 – Using the RGB Slider in More Colors dialog box.
When I first ran across this issue, the only 2 workarounds I could think of were to run PowerPoint on an older OS or on Windows. I have a couple of machines on Snow Leopard and there is no problem settings colors accurately. I also use Bootcamp and Parallels and PowerPoint under Windows sets colors correctly. But both of those a clunky options, so I kept researching.
I've found several alternative color pickers that solve the problem. Today I'm writing about Developer Color Picker. While this is aimed at web developers, it works well for graphic designers as well. There instructions that come with the download, but basically you just copy the downloaded file into your user Library>Color Pickers folder, then restart your applications. (If your Library folder is hidden, hold down the Alt key and click on Go in the Finder. Library will be in the list.)
When you restart PowerPoint, you'll discover an additional panel in the picker. The colors you enter on this panel are accurate and stable, unaffected by color management. Use this to set your PowerPoint theme colors and you'll have happy clients once again!
EDIT
Since publishing the above, a client mentioned a similar problem area: exporting client logos from Adobe Illustrator. It's not enough to set RGB colors in Illustrator. You also have to use File>Document Color Mode to change the default CMYK mode to RGB. Otherwise, Illustrator's color management will alter your RGB values and the resulting logo will not match brand standards.
This article picks up where my last article, Working with Colored Text and Backgrounds in Microsoft Office, left off, by offering another tool for working with colored text in the Microsoft Office products.
Depending on your background, you may or may not be aware that, underneath the pretty visual tools that make it so easy to apply colors to your text and the background on which it is drawn, what goes into the document is a numerical code that is converted back into a color for rendering on your video display or your color printer. For most day to day applications, you can afford to let Microsoft Office (Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Outlook) deal with the codes, without giving them a second thought.
Sooner or later, though, you may be faced with the task of making the colors in something else, such as a clip art image or other object that is going into a document match one or more of the colors used in the document. How do you do that?
After facing this challenge from time to time, I realized that there was an easier way to address it than the tedious way I had been doing so, and set about to make a chart of the colors and their RGB codes, the magic numbers mentioned in the first paragraph. The picture at the top of this article shows most of the working bits of the Microsoft Excel document that displays the chart.
Depending on your immediate needs, the codes may need to be an one of three formats.
- The color picker in your paint program probably needs the three color codes for Red, Green, and Blue as three decimal numbers. This is the format of the codes shown in the picture at the head of this article.
- Other programs may expect hexadecimal RGB values.
- Your Web design tools most likely expect a single six-character hexadecimal string.
All three formats are readily available from the workbook. Just below the color chart is a handy pull-down list of formats, shown in the picture below.
This is a standard Excel validation list; the valid values are displayed in the cells below the drop-down list, which becomes active when you select the cell to the right of the label, 'Select Display Format.' Make your choice, and watch the codes change before your eyes.
The picture above shows the hexadecimal codes, rendered as space separated lists, easily separated for inputting into your image editor or other program.
The far left of the spreadsheet is occupied by a picture of the actual color picker; this is the way it looks in Microsoft Office Excel 2010; the pickers in Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook are identical in appearance and function. The main chart is arranged in exactly the same order, but the cells are bigger, to accommodate the formatted color code strings. Though the worksheet is protected, you can select any cell in the table, and hit CTRL-C to get the code into the Windows Clipboard.
![Word for mac rgb color picker Word for mac rgb color picker](/uploads/1/2/4/8/124832170/680244384.jpg)
Where Can I Get My Own Copy?
MSOColors.XLSX is the standard Microsoft Excel workbook from which the images shown above were captured. If you visited before about 4 PM Central Daylight Time (21::00 UTC), this space discussed a macro-enabled workbook. Overnight, I decided that I should replace that with a conventional workbook, so that nobody need fret over unsigned VBA code.
This change required me to do some additional processing, and resulted in several new named ranges, and one that I left nameless, because all references to it are relative references to individual cells.
To prevent accidental changes that could render the workbook unusable, the workbook and the individual worksheets are password protected. The format selector cell, whose value must be edited to make the workbook useful, is available for editing and selection, and any cell on either worksheet may be selected and copied, so that you can use the Windows Clipboard to move the calculated values to wherever you need them. Unless someone can offer me a compelling reason to disclose it, I intend to keep the password to myself. If you really must know, please contact me privately, and explain why you think you need it.
The other sheet in the book, labeled Index of Named Ranges, on the tab just to the left of the main sheet, is a utility sheet that I pull into any book that contains more than a couple of named ranges, which is most of the books that I create and use. How it gets populated is left as an exercise for the reader, but I'll give you a hint; it's by way of long established standard features of the user interface.
Have fun with the magic color codes!