I color highlight cells in Excel (Office 365) but they aren't saved

March 5, 2019 4:05 AM

I'm stumped: I need to color highlight some cells in Excel.

I highlight the cell and fill with a color, and save my changes before closing the file. When I re-open the file, the colored highlights are gone.

I'm using a MB Pro, running OS Mojave 10.14.2 and use Office 365 Excel for Mac, V 15.27.

Any help much appreciated.

posted by lometogo to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Best answer: Is the file format something other than .xlsx?
posted by Johnny Assay at 4:07 AM on March 5, 2019 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: yes, it's a .csv. Is that the problem?
posted by lometogo at 4:09 AM on March 5, 2019 [1 favorite]

Yes, csv doesn’t save formatting. If you want color you have to save it as an excel file.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 4:11 AM on March 5, 2019 [1 favorite]

Quite likely. CSV is a more "basic" file format that just contains the values of the cells separated by commas as plain text. (CSV = "comma-separated value".) It's more portable between different applications, but it also doesn't contain all of the nice formatting you want such as highlighted cells. On some versions of Excel, the software will warn you that the formatting will be lost when you save it such a file, but perhaps this error message has been disabled on your system.

To get around this, save it as an .xlsx file instead.
posted by Johnny Assay at 4:14 AM on March 5, 2019

Response by poster: I must use the .csv file for a mail program I use. Looks like I'll need to keep both if I want my highlights. Thanks folks.
posted by lometogo at 4:21 AM on March 5, 2019

If your .xlsx spreadsheet is simple data (which if you're exporting to .csv for your other program seems to be the case)... then you can probably find a simple `xlsx2csv.exe` sort of conversion program to make the .xlsx file into .csv as just a part of the import-to-mail bit of the workflow. This wold save you from having to remember to save twice (one .xlsx and one .csv) and would remove the chance that the two files are out of sync.
posted by zengargoyle at 8:14 AM on March 5, 2019

Best answer: Could you add a column to indicate certain cells instead of using color? Once the cells are highlighted, sort by color and put "blue" or "group 1" or whatever into a column in all of the rows. They wouldn't be visually easy to sort out, but at least you could group them that way quickly in the .csv just by sorting by that column.
posted by papayaninja at 9:24 AM on March 5, 2019 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks for everyone's suggestions.
posted by lometogo at 6:41 PM on March 9, 2019