Changing an Excel cell's backcolor using hex results in Excel displaying completely different color in the spreadsheet

c# excel interop excel-interop vba
Amberite picture Amberite · Sep 14, 2011 · Viewed 24.2k times · Source

So I am setting an Excel cell's Interior Color to a certain value, like below:

worksheet.Cells[1, 1].Interior.Color = 0xF1DCDB;

However, when I then open up the spreadsheet in Excel, I see that the color that came out is completely different (in the above case, the color in the resulting spreadsheet is 0xDCDCEF). I tried a few different colors and it always changes it, and I don't see a pattern.

Is there any reason for this? I even tried setting the color by writing Color.FromArgb(241, 220, 219).ToArgb(), and the same thing happened.

Answer

Amberite picture Amberite · Sep 15, 2011

I finally figured it out, after lots of tests, and it was something really simple. Apparently, Excel's Interop library has a bug and is reversing the Red and Blue values, so instead of passing it a hex of RGB, I need to pass BGR, and suddenly the colors work just fine. I'm amazed that this bug isn't documented anywhere else on the internet.

So if anyone else ever runs into this problem, simply pass Excel values in BGR values. (Or if using Color.FromArgb(), pass in Color.FromArgb(B, G, R))

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