Home → Troubleshooting → @RISK for Excel: Other Issues → Color Cells Not Working
Applies to: @RISK 5.x–7.x
I selected Color Cells in the @RISK tab of the Excel ribbon, but my inputs and outputs aren't colored. What's wrong?
Color Cells are implemented using Excel's conditional formatting feature, so anything that interferes with conditional formatting will interfere with Color Cells. There are also some issues relating only to Color Cells.
Make sure to enable Color Cells by clicking the Color Cells button in the @RISK tab of the ribbon. The background of the Color Cells icon will change to let you know that it's active.
By design, Color Cells don't work in a workbook that is programmatically created (such as our report workbooks, or any workbook created by program code). Color Cells work in workbooks you open interactively by clicking File » New or File » Open in Excel, by double-clicking a workbook on your desktop or in a folder, and so forth..
There is an upper limit of approximately 10,000 cells that can be colored. After that, @RISK will turn off the feature, and a message will appear in the Excel status bar.
Conditional formatting rules for @RISK inputs, outputs, and statistic functions may become corrupted by the other existing rules in your workbook or may simply conflict with rules you created yourself. If this happens, please select the affected range and delete all the Conditional Formatting rules that affect it: Home » Conditional Formatting » Clear Rules » Clear Rules from Selected Cells. Turn on Color Cells to apply the changes.
@RISK cannot apply conditional formatting rules to protected spreadsheets. When this is an issue, @RISK shows the message "Input/output cells were protected and could not be formatted as specified in Application Settings." Unprotect your worksheet before enabling Color Cells again.
When you're using @RISK with Excel 2010 and Project, cell formatting for @RISK functions is only available in saved workbooks. @RISK shows a message in this situation. Save your project .XLSX file, close and restart @RISK, and reopen the file to use formatting.
In @RISK 6.3.0, Color Cells don't work correctly in Excel 2013. Upgrade to the current version of @RISK to solve this.
Last edited: 2017-02-17