Correcting Pale Shading of Selected Cells

Summary: Does the pale coloring scheme used to mark selected cells by Excel 2007 drive you nuts? You aren't alone. Here's an idea of what you can do to reduce the frustration.

Ted just switched to Excel 2007. Whenever he select multiple cells, all the cells are white, not shaded blue as in previous versions of Excel. This means he cannot tell which cell is the active cell. When Ted uses the Ctrl key to select multiple cells in different parts of the worksheet, he cannot even tell which cells have been selected. Ted wonders how he can get Excel 2007 to shade selected cells as was done in previous versions of the program.

The short answer is that you can't. In fact, it appears that the coloring of many parts of Excel (including selections) are hard-coded. In previous versions of Excel you could change the colors in Windows itself; this won't really affect Excel 2007 that much.

The problem, has been known since the earliest betas of Excel 2007, and still Microsoft has done nothing to fix it. There is an interesting blog post over on the MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) site that talks about this issue and provides a few workarounds:

http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2008/04/22/improving-sheet-selection.aspx

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Correcting Pale Shading of Selected Cells