Therefore, hex also has the same 16,777,216 combinations as RGB and long.

In hex, the lowest value is zero and the highest value is F (which is equal to 15). Therefore, there are 16 possible individual digits. This means that from two digits we can create 256 shades (16 x 16 = 256), which is the same as RGB. We generally use Base-10 in everyday life, which means that we have 10 digits (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) available. As an example, the number 14 is created by using the formula (1 x base) + 4. The base is 10, so the result is calculated as (1 x 10) + 4, which equals 14.įor Base-16, there are 16 digits however, as we don’t have enough number characters we use A, B, C, D, E and F to represent the numbers from 10 through 15.Īs an example, the hex number AB equals 171. The critical difference is that the hex system represents the numbers from 0 to 255 using just two characters. This is possible because hex uses Base-16. Hex color codes are similar to RGB as they also use 256 shades for each individual color. Since the introduction of hex codes in the color picker, there is now native conversion between RGB, Hex and HSL color codes.

Color picker – Excel 2021 and Excel 365.

Hex (which is short for hexadecimal) color codes are found in two places in Excel. Long and RGB are related they are just different ways of calculating the same number. Long = Blue x 256 x 256 + Green x 256 + Red The long code is a number from 0 to 16,777,215, where each separate number represents a color. The relationship between RGB and long is based on a simple calculation: The long color code is used by VBA when displaying the color property of an item. The following macro displays the long code for the fill of the active cell.

Luminance (or lightness) – is a percentage of grey. 0% is black, 100% is white.įrustratingly, Excel does not handle HSL in the standard way. Instead, Excel measures all the numbers where 0 is the lowest and 255 is the biggest. But, it’s a quirk we can handle.

Saturation – is a percentage of the amount of color included. 100% is full color, 0% is no color (i.e.

Hue – is the degree on the color wheel from 0 to 360. 0 is red, 120 is green, 240 is blue.

HSL tries to define colors closer to the way humans think about colors. Within the standard color dialog box there is another code format using the color model drop-down we can change to HSL. HSL uses Hue, Saturation and Luminance to create the color. The individual colors Red, Green and Blue each have 256 different shades, which when mixed can create 16,777,216 different color combinations. The RGB (Red, Green and Blue) color code is used within the standard color dialog box. User Defined Functions for color conversionĮven in Excel, there are four different methods of defining color RGB, hex, HSL and long.

Color converter hex to rgb