Available Color

More Than 10 Colors, But Less Than 16 Million

Here's a situation you may have encountered: you are working in Excel and you need a new color, one that hasn't been used before in the spreadsheet. Where do you go once you have exhausted all the standard colors (and maybe the theme colors)? You could go searching in the "more colors" dialog, yet good luck finding that color again (the Standard tab is somewhat better than the Custom tab, but the honeycomb design isn't exactly user-friendly)!

Just Gimme An Available Color

To help, we compiled a scheme of 56 always-available colors (why 56? because old versions of Excel used a 56 color system – and still do for number formats)¹ .

Tip: Lay these colors out in a blank workbook to keep on hand for future reference and for ease of access. Unfortunately, making your own theme color template is pointless, because theme colors are relative and can change once a user copies a cell from another document. Custom colors need to be hard coded in order to be permanent and universal across devices, users and documents.

Methodology

These 56 go-to colors were determined with the following objectives in mind:

We wanted bright colors, not black and white, and especially no shades of grey. Besides, all theme colors have two rows of mandatory monochrome, so those "colors" are never in short supply.
To keep it simple, we selected Hue multiples of 15° (or 10 on a 239 or 240 scale like MS Paint). Definitely an arbitrary choice (note: Excel uses a 255 system for saturation in the HSL custom color dialog, so translations from H degrees are not straightforward).
We needed vibrant colors, where either the Saturation or Value percentages were 100%.
We excluded Excel standard colors or any colors that closely match them. And to further promote novelty, we also tried to stay clear of popular Excel theme colors.
We determined that 8 of the colors (why 8? because we arranged the colors in a 8x7 grid) should be darker. Likewise, their complement colors (to be used for borders and text of the same cell) should be lighter, not darker. These are to be used in instances where you want light text on a dark cell to draw the reader's attention.
Complement colors (aka accent colors), although they aren't the main focus of this exercise, should not be duplicates of any other color used herein.
We attempted to stack the deck with as many Excel Color Picker Dialog colors as we could. In the end, 22 of the 56 are already in the Excel 'more colors' presets. On a sidenote, we dislike that Color Picker dialog box, since the colors are hard to see, and once used, are equally hard to find again.
Without going into boring details, we tried to include as many legacy colors as possible (though sometimes we repaired them to fit other constraints). In the end, we were able to grandfather 19 colors from the previous system.
MS Paint colors and ones from the original Excel 56 were allowed, but their inclusion was merely coincidental.
We wanted the largest variety of distinct colors, for all uses (though primarily for cell shading/fill, rather than text). As such, we tried to pick colors across the whole spectrum.
We needed some rationale to whittle down the large amounts of possible colors (even at regular increments of 20%, the choices can become overwhelming), so some measure of personal taste was used.

We hope you find an available color from this list. With it, you can make your work distinctive and visually pleasing!

Notes

LONG: Only Excel understands this color code in decimals. Use DEC for all other applications.
Excel Color Picker = The standard dialog box that appears when you click "more colors"².
Color Name = Totally arbitrary, with the goal of trying to make them unique across a large swatch.
Complement Colors = Different shade (usually darker) than the main color. Does not represent a complementary color in the color theory sense!