10.5. Customizing Color Whenever you add color to a font, a border, or any of the shapes described in this chapter, Word shows you a palette of suggested colors from the document's theme to guide you in your choices. But don't feel constrained if you don't like the colors on the menu. You can open the Colors box shown in Figure 10-16 and create just about any color you can imagine. | | Figure 10-16. The Office 2007 Colors box lets you pick colors in two ways.
Top: The Standard tab is the easiest to usejust click a color swatch.
Bottom: The Custom tab gives you great color control, but requires a couple extra clicks. You don't need to know anything about these cryptic three-digit numbers in order to use the Custom tab, but if you're curious , see the box. | |
(This box is the same in all the Office programs, so you only have to learn how to use it once.) The Standard tab shows colors arranged as hexagons within a hexagon. Click a color or a gray shade (at the bottom) to make a selection. The Custom tab gives you more control over your color selection. To use it, click the rainbow-colored box on the left, and you get a crosshair cursor to choose a color with. Position the crosshairs on the color in the spectrum you want, and then click the slider on the right to adjust your chosen color's lightness or darkness . Using these two controls, you can select any color your computer can create. As you work with the Colors spectrum and the slider, the New and Current boxes show you a preview of how you're changing the color. POWER USERS' CLINIC
Specifying Colors by Numbers | | When graphic designers talk about color, they use a numerical system from 0 to 255, where any color imaginable can be described as a combination of red, green, and blue. A value of 0 means that the color contains none of that hue, with 255 being the maximum amount. These numbers let you describe color with great precision. For example, R197, G216, B255 specifies a particular shade of blue. To create this color in Word's Colors box, type 197 in the Red box, 216 in the Green box, and 255 in the Blue box. If you're company's logo specifies that shade of blue, you can type these numbers to get it exactly right every time. Fortunately, you can forget everything you've read in this box and still create custom colors in Word. When you click a color and move the lightness/darkness slider in the Colors box, Word fills in the RGB numbers for you. The other color model used in the Colors box is HSL, which stands for hue, saturation (intensity), and luminosity (brightness). Saturation refers to the amount of the actual color (hue) in the mix, and luminosity determines the amount of white or black mixed in to create degrees of lightness and darkness. Here, too, you can type numbers if you know them, or just use the color spectrum and slider until you've got the color you want. |
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