Displaying Multiple Filtered Colors

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated March 1, 2025)
This tip applies to Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024, and Excel in Microsoft 365


1

Kris knows how to filter information in a worksheet by color. The filtering tools allow him to select which color of text or background he wants to display. Kris wonders if there is a way to filter so that multiple colors are displayed. If he is filtering by cell contents, he can easily pick multiple matching items to be displayed but cannot figure out how to do it for colors.

There are two ways you can go about this. The first approach doesn't rely on filtering at all. Instead, sort your data by color. If you do two (or more) sorting passes, you should be able to get the desired colors all next to each other. Then, select the remaining rows (the one using colors you don't want to see) and hide those rows.

Again, this is just a workaround, and it can work fine for relatively short lists of data. The second approach is to use a helper column. All you need to do is to enter, in each cell of the helper column, the name of the color in that row—i.e., red, orange, yellow, green, etc. You can then filter by that column and thereby display multiple colors in your filtered results.

If your data table is too long, typing all those colors could get monotonous and be prone to errors. You could, if desired, create two very short user-defined functions that would simply return the color of a specific cell. This UDF returns the color of the text itself:

Function FColor(cell)
    FColor = cell.Font.ColorIndex
End Function

The following is a variation that returns the interior color of the cell itself:

Function IColor(cell)
    IColor = cell.Interior.ColorIndex
End Function

In your helper column, enter a formula that relies on the desired UDF. For instance, if you want to filter by the interior color in column A, you would enter this formula in the helper column of row 1:

=IColor(A1)

The cell should now contain the color number. Copy this cell down as far as necessary, and then filter by the contents of this column. Since you can select multiple numeric values to appear in your filtered data, you effectively end up with multiple colors in the results.

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ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (13611) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024, and Excel in Microsoft 365.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

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What is 9 - 6?

2025-03-11 13:46:19

J. Woolley

Both of the Tip's functions return a ColorIndex property's value. ColorIndex picks from the 56 color current palette, which is usually the same as the default palette. The first 2 colors are black and white, leaving 54 actual colors. But 10 colors in the default palette are duplicates, so only 44 of the 54 are unique. A broader range of colors is given by the Color property, which is a combination of red, green, and blue values (RGB).
The AboutColors macro in My Excel Toolbox creates a worksheet illustrating all colors defined by Excel: Current Palette, Default Palette, Theme Color, Standard Color, vbColor, vbSystemColor, and xlRgbColor. Notice two different Color values might be represented by the same ColorIndex value (see Figure 1 below) .
Here are My Excel Toolbox alternatives to the Tip's FColor and IColor functions, where ColorRGB is equivalent to RGB Long:
    =FontColor([Cell]) -- returns Cell's font ColorRGB
    =FillColor([Cell]) -- returns Cell's interior fill ColorRGB
Both of these functions return "conditional" if the cell has a conditional format specifying a color different from the base color, even if the condition is not satisfied.
The following functions are also included in My Excel Toolbox:
    =ColorRGB(R, G, B)
    =ColorName(ColorRGB)
    =ColorIndex_Name(ColorIndex)
    =ColorAsRed(ColorRGB)
    =ColorAsGreen(ColorRGB)
    =ColorAsBlue(ColorRGB)
    =ColorAsHex(ColorRGB)
    =HexAsColor(HexRGB)
    =Darkness(ColorRGB)
    =IsCurrentPalette(ColorRGB)
    =IsDefaultPalette(ColorRGB)
    =SetFill([Color], [PatternStyle], [PatternColor], [Target])
    =SetFont([Name], [Size], [Style], [Color], [Underline], ..., [Target])
    =ChooseColor_Dialog(DefaultColor, CustomColors())
    =CurrentPalette() -- returns an array of ColorRGB values
    =DefaultPalette() -- returns an array of ColorRGB values
    =ThemeColors() -- returns an array of ColorRGB values
    =StandardColors() -- returns an array of ColorRGB values
See https://sites.google.com/view/MyExcelToolbox/

Figure 1. 


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