Colors

Macabacus includes several cycles and other tools for coloring cells and chart elements. Colors used by these tools can be customized in the Excel > Format > Colors section of the Settings dialog. When customizing these colors, you can choose from any color in your Macabacus color palette. If you want to use a color in your cycle that is not available in your palette, you must first modify your palette to include that color.

AutoColor

In financial and other types of modeling, font colors are commonly used to visually characterize cell content. For example, numeric inputs are typically colored blue. Macabacus lets you create an AutoColor scheme that defines which font colors to use for cells containing numeric inputs, partial inputs, formulas that reference cells on the same worksheet, formulas that reference cells in other worksheets and workbooks, hyperlinks, and formulas that contain external data functions (e.g., FactSet or CapIQ "pulls").

The default AutoColor scheme that installs with Macabacus reflects the finance industry standard, but you can modify these colors as desired in the Settings dialog. In practice, your AutoColor colors should be the same as or similar to those in your Font Color Cycle.

What is a partial input?

Partial inputs are formulas that contain one or more inputs, or "hardcoded" values, such as =A1+12.34. This formula is effectively an input because we have hardcoded the value 12.34 into the formula. Accordingly, you might expect AutoColor to apply the same font color to this cell that it applies to normal input cells (those containing just a number). If so, specify the same color for inputs and partial inputs in your AutoColor scheme. Alternatively, assign a unique color for partial inputs.

Whether a formula is a partial input can be subjective. The formula in the example above is clearly a partial input, but what about the formula =CHOOSE(2,A1,A2,A3)? Does the value "2" constitute a partial input? Macabacus' AutoColor algorithm makes that determination for you, and you may not always agree with it. If this happens often, you can disable AutoColoring for partial inputs by removing the partial inputs color from your AutoColor scheme.

Macabacus ignores the values 0, 1, 100, 1000, and 1000000 in formulas when checking for partial inputs.

AutoColor on Entry

With this feature enabled, Macabacus will automatically color cell fonts according to your AutoColor scheme as you enter cell values and formulas.

Performance considerations

AutoColor on Entry may slow down some operations involving large numbers of cells, and may adversely impact Undo/Redo behavior. For this reason, AutoColor on Entry is disabled by default.

Alternate Row/Column Shading

Shade odd/even rows/columns in the selection the default shading color. Because Macabacus uses conditional formatting to achieve alternate shading, alternate shading will persist as rows/columns are inserted and removed. Alternate shading can be cycled using a keyboard shortcut, or applied using the buttons on the Macabacus > Format > Color > Row/Column Shading menu.

Note that conditional formatting is "volatile," and may slow down Excel when used extensively or applied to very large cell ranges. You can alternatively apply alternating row/column shading using traditional (i.e., non-conditional) formatting with Macabacus' Modify Rows and Modify Columns tools.

_{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.}