Return background color of selected cell

Question

I have a spreadsheet which cells in are colored meaningfully.

Does any body know how i can return the background color value of a current cell in Excel sheet?

Answer 1

The code below gives the HEX and RGB value of the range whether formatted using conditional formatting or otherwise. If the range is not formatted using Conditional Formatting and you intend to use iColor function in the Excel as UDF. It won't work. Read the below excerpt from MSDN.

Note that the DisplayFormat property does not work in user defined functions. For example, in a worksheet function that returns the interior color of a cell, if you use a line similar to:

Range.DisplayFormat.Interior.ColorIndex

then the worksheet function executes to return a #VALUE! error. If you are not finding color of the conditionally formatted range, then I encourage you to rather use

Range.Interior.ColorIndex

as then the function can also be used as UDF in Excel. Such as iColor(B1,"HEX")

Public Function iColor(rng As Range, Optional formatType As String) As Variant
'formatType: Hex for #RRGGBB, RGB for (R, G, B) and IDX for VBA Color Index
    Dim colorVal As Variant
    colorVal = rng.DisplayFormat.Interior.Color
    Select Case UCase(formatType)
        Case "HEX"
            iColor = "#" & Format(Hex(colorVal Mod 256),"00") & _
                           Format(Hex((colorVal \ 256) Mod 256),"00") & _
                           Format(Hex((colorVal \ 65536)),"00")
        Case "RGB"
            iColor = Format((colorVal Mod 256),"00") & ", " & _
                     Format(((colorVal \ 256) Mod 256),"00") & ", " & _
                     Format((colorVal \ 65536),"00")
        Case "IDX"
            iColor = rng.Interior.ColorIndex
        Case Else
            iColor = colorVal
    End Select
End Function

'Example use of the iColor function
Sub Get_Color_Format()
    Dim rng As Range

    For Each rng In Selection.Cells
        rng.Offset(0, 1).Value = iColor(rng, "HEX")
        rng.Offset(0, 2).Value = iColor(rng, "RGB")
    Next
End Sub

Answer 2

Maybe you can use this properties:

ActiveCell.Interior.ColorIndex - one of 56 preset colors

and

ActiveCell.Interior.Color - RGB color, used like that:

ActiveCell.Interior.Color = RGB(255,255,255)

Answer 3

If you are looking at a Table, a Pivot Table, or something with conditional formatting, you can try:

ActiveCell.DisplayFormat.Interior.Color

This also seems to work just fine on regular cells.

Answer 4

You can use Cell.Interior.Color, I've used it to count the number of cells in a range that have a given background color (ie. matching my legend).