Color Palettes

Native Office theme colors, introduced in Office 2007, present three major challenges for professional users:

• The colors you want to work with or that reflect your company's brand identity are not reliably available in native palettes, which are populated with theme colors implemented at the Office document level that can vary from one document to another.
• You may only specify up to eight theme colors; Microsoft dictates your corporate branding by picking other theme colors based on variants of those eight colors—like them or not—which is unacceptable.
• The colors you use when building financial models often differ from those you use to create presentations, so no single color theme is suitable for use across all Office applications.

Macabacus overcomes these Office deficiencies with fixed, fully customizable color palettes that are always available in Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. This allows greater consistency in the formatting of models, presentations, and documents produced by you or your organization.

You can create an unlimited number of color palettes to support different business units in your organization. Macabacus palettes are conveniently accessible via button/menu controls on the Macabacus tab for changing font, fill, and border colors.

Macabacus installs with a default 56-color palette, which you should customize to your preferences in the Excel > Color Palettes section of the Settings dialog, accessible from the Macabacus > Settings menu. The Import Colors button lets you customize your color palette quickly. In Excel, set the fill colors and text of a range of cells as you want them to appear in your palette. Then, select the range and click the Import Colors button. Macabacus will populate the palette based on the fill colors and text in your selection.

Be sure that your palette includes colors used in financial modeling, such as blue for inputs, green for worksheet links, etc. Macabacus color palettes can be shared across your organization using Shared Settings. Macabacus color palettes and Office themes are not mutually exclusive, and may be used in tandem.

Menu or Gallery

For versions 9.7.8 and forward, Macabacus requires you to create a palette using a 1xN linear layout as shown above. Users are able to select if they want their palette to display as a gallery or a menu by going to Macabacus > Settings > Ribbon and selecting their preferred option. Menus will be the default for all users.

_{This documentation refers to the latest Macabacus version. Some features and descriptions of these features may not apply to older versions of Macabacus. Update your Macabacus software to take advantage of the latest features.}