Color a cell the same as another cell's fill color

Greetings. I've searched through the Excel community for how to do this, but all I find is conditional formatting which doesn't seem to work for my case. I have a spreadsheet with a week by week sc...

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Formulas and Functions

JKPieterse

Silver Contributor

Mar 13, 2025

The only way you might pull this off is by using a macro. Note you will have to adjust the cell range "D1:E2" to match yours:

Sub ColorRegionFromFormulas()
    Dim cl As Range
    Dim sourceCell As Range
    Application.ScreenUpdating = False
    For Each cl In Range("D1:E2")
        cl.Select    'Necessary!
        Application.Goto Evaluate(cl.Formula2)
        With cl.Interior
            .Color = ActiveCell.Interior.Color    'In case it isn't a themed color
            On Error Resume Next
            .Pattern = ActiveCell.Interior.Pattern
            .PatternColorIndex = ActiveCell.Interior.PatternColorIndex
            .ThemeColor = ActiveCell.Interior.ThemeColor
            .TintAndShade = ActiveCell.Interior.TintAndShade
            .PatternTintAndShade = ActiveCell.Interior.PatternTintAndShade
        End With
    Next
End Sub

rwrussell

Copper Contributor

Mar 13, 2025

Greetings,

Thanks for the responses. As a few of you had stated, using a macro adds a level of complexity that I don't really want to get into along with having to run the macros each time an update is made. Currently, when I print off each week's schedule, I just need to change the Week name field to the current week and print the schedule. Using macros would require running the macro every time.

I did find a solution on my own. I installed the Real Statistics resource pack and used the FillColor function to populate a cell outside of the printable page for each team entry in the schedule with the color of the team number for that week and match.

Team # cell = INDEX(sched_north,$R4,$S4)

Fill Color = FillColor(INDEX(sched_north,$R4,$S4),TRUE) ; populates into T4-24, U4-24, V4-24 and W4-24

I then created conditional formating rules using a formula to apply a formatting color:

$T4="yellow" ; apply the fill color yellow

I needed to create conditional formatting rules for each color (five different colors). I then needed to copy these five rules for each column in the schedule (four columns) referencing T4-27, U4-27, V4-27 and W4-27. This was a little cumbersome but using Format Painter to copy the rules for the columns made it quicker.

I didn't like having to polulate a cell with each fill color and reference that with the conditional formatting rules, but since I couldn't use the FillColor function in the conditional formating rules, this was the only way to get it to work.

I tried to post a section of the spreadsheet in here even after copying and pasting as values, but I got a huge list of HTML errors.

Again, thanks for the replies.

---RWR

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Color a cell the same as another cell's fill color

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