If you can use gradient color in your work, you are sure to improve your work efficiency. In this article, we will introduce two methods to fill your worksheet with gradient color.

It is very easy for you to fill a cell or a range with a certain color. Besides, you can also fill gradient color in a cell. However, there is no direct way in Excel to fill a range with gradient color. Now we have found two methods to finish this task.

Method 1: Insert Background

(This option isn't available in Word 2007 or Word 2003.) A gradient fill lets you blend two or more colors instead of just one. In the Page Background group, click the Page Color dropdown,. With Pages, you can create professional-looking documents that are compatible with other word processing software such as Microsoft Word and OpenOffice. Additionally, each and every document that you create is automatically saved to iCloud and can be wirelessly shared between iDevices for easy access.

In this method, you can insert an image with gradient color as the background.

1. Find an image with the gradient color that you like. Or you can also make such an image in your computer.
2. Now open the target Excel that you need to fill gradient color.
3. In the worksheet, click the tab “Page Layout” in the ribbon.
4. And then click the button “Background” in the toolbar.
5. After that, choose the path that contains the target image.
6. Next select this image.
7. And then click the button “Insert” in the window.

Thus, the image has become the background of this worksheet.

Using this method is very easy. But on the other hand, you need to adjust the image size, so that you can fit the cell. Otherwise, there will be two different colors in one cell like the image show. This is actually the border of the background image.

Method 2: Use VBA Macro

Here we will introduce another method. And you will need to use Excel VBA to finish this task. Before you fill the gradient color, you need to choose the two different colors for the worksheet. What’s more, you also need to decide the RGB numbers of two colors for the gradient color. In this example, we will use the two color: RGB(125,205,242) and RGB(215,239,228).

1. Press the button “Alt +F11” on the keyboard. Thus, you can open the Visual Basic editor.
2. In this editor, insert a new module.
3. After that, copy the following codes into the module:

In this example, we will fill the range A1:E100. And the calculation method is shown in the codes. Besides, for different color parameters, you need to adjust the formula according to the actual numbers. Because the color parameters are all integer, we will also round the numbers in case there exist errors.

4. And then run this macro. You can press the button “F5” on the keyboard to run it. On the other hand, you can also click the button “Run Sub”.
5. After that, come back to the worksheet. We have zoomed out the worksheet so that you can see clearly. The target range is filled with gradient color.

When you need to fill other range with gradient color, you need to modify the codes and run it again.

A Comparison of the Two Methods

You can see that both methods are very effective. But sometimes you will not know which method you can use. In the table below, we have listed all the advantages and disadvantages of the two methods that we can think of.

Now you have a deeper understand of the two methods. And the next time you will know which method you can use in your actual worksheet.

Keep a Safe Environment for Your Excel Files

The environment is also very important for your Excel files. If the environment is not safe, you cannot make sure that Excel files will always be safe. However, even you have prepared a lot, you still have the chance to meet with Excel corruption. Therefore, you can prepare a third-party beforehand. Once your Excel corrupts, you can use this tool to repair corrupt xlsx data immediately.

Author Introduction:

Anna Ma is a data recovery expert in DataNumen, Inc., which is the world leader in data recovery technologies, including repair Word doc document corruption and outlook repair software products. For more information visit www.datanumen.com