Following up yesterday's post on coloring and formatting, here are some additional thoughts.  First, what do you do after you have color-coded all of the text in your cells, and then need to paste the spreadsheet into a presentation?  From experience, a lot of senior people get irrationally upset if the text is color-coded rather than all black.  So you could always select the range you are copying, change all the text to black, paste into the presentation and then "undo" in Excel to preserve your color-coding.  Or maybe now that you know all the shortcuts to color-code a spreadsheet within a few seconds, you don't care.  But you should care that traditional copying and pasting using Excel 2007 results in gridlines being pasted, often when you don't want them to appear.  Another big formatting annoyance.

This will make sense later...I promise

What many people do not know is that Excel can copy a selection as it appears on a physical printout.  Moreover, most printers these days have a special setting that is loosely defined as "print all text black."  The command is in different places depending on your specific printer and software, but the idea is that when you physically print a document, borders and backgrounds will print in color, while all text will print in black.  Logically, if your default printer had these settings, copying and pasting would yield the same results, eliminating the problem of having to recolor and uncolor text.  At the very least, you can paste things without the gridlines.  Here is what do (skip to step 5 if you don't care about text colors):

1. CTRL + P for print
2. ALT + R for properties...
3. What happens next differs for each printer, but typically within the "advanced" settings, you will find an option for printing text as black.  Select that option.
4. If you use CTRL + C for copying a range and pasting as a picture, you will find that the pasted image still maintains colors in the text.  The reason is that Excel is copying what appears on the screen, including gridlines, which is largely painful if you like seeing gridlines but need to remove them for every paste-in of a presentation.
5. To address the CTRL + C issue, select the range you want to copy, and then type ALT, H, V, A, C, P, ENTER, which opens up the home tab on the ribbon, then the paste menu (not intuitive when you are trying to copy something), the "As picture" option, the "Copy as picture..." option, and finally the "As shown when printed" option.  By doing this, you have told Excel to make a copy of the picture exactly as if it were printed.
6. Now, in Word or Powerpoint, you can hit CTRL + ALT + V for paste special (notice that often in the 2007 suite, ALT + E +S no longer works) and select the enhanced metafile option.

Voila!  Pasted with no gridlines and as black text.  Bonus point on colors: In Excel 2007, you can transfer color palettes easily by saving them and them copying them out of the default folder.  ALT + P for page layout, then T, C for "Colors" followed by ALT + C for "Create New Theme Colors..."  If you name this theme, it will show up in your default color palette folder as an XML file; on my computer, the folder is C:\Users\Ron Mexico\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\Document Themes.  You can then freely copy these palettes to the same folder on other computers, which will cause them to appear on your Excel palette menu.

That also works for the other Microsoft applications, which should make it clear to you why the Presentations group used to call me MichaelSoft Jordan.  Oh shit!

-F-One