Name That Color

I sometimes have to create graphics in more than one application and need to keep the colors consistent. That’s not too much of a challenge transferring colors in the Microsoft Office Suite (i.e., Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) because all those applications use the same color palette. Going from Office to a non-Microsoft application, however, is more difficult because you have to know how to specify colors.

Colors can be specified in three ways — by a name, by a set of three numbers that represent the amount of red, green, and blue in the color (an RGB triplet), or by a set of three hexadecimal numbers that represent the amount of red, green (a hex triplet).

Names are the worst way to designate a color. Beyond the primary colors, everyone seems to have a different name for their favorite colors. RGB and hexadecimal formats are equivalent. The three RGB values each range from 0 to 255. Those numbers divided by 16 (ignoring any remainder) are the hexadecimal digits. Hexadecimal digits range from 0 and F, where the letters A to F represent the numbers 10 to 15.

You don’t have to understand how any of this works so long as you have the Hex or RGB codes for the colors you want to use. So, I created this chart of RGB and Hex specifications for the standard colors in MS Office. I use the chart to specify colors in non-Microsoft applications that are the same (at least close) to the colors Office applications use. I included names but they are not all unique to the colors they represent. Most of the names came from chir.ag and a few came from colorhexa.com.