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Setting colours when writing Excel

nic_ran
Contributor
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Hi,

 

I'm tryng to do some fancy colour manipulation when using the Excel writer. I'm already using a template XLS to define the basic structure of my output worksheet and that's working fine.

 

 

I'm also defining custom cell (column) formatting on the feature type user attribute definitions, which allows me to specify custom number/date/text format strings and a custom font colour. That's working fine.

 

 

What I would like to do is set a custom background colour for a particular row.

 

 

I know that FME is capable of setting the background colour because if I choose the "Simple" Format Type for the attribute column properties I can specify the font / font color / fill color for a column and it works. However, if I choose the "Custom" Format Type then I have to enter in an Excel compliant format string which onlly offers font colour and not fill colour.

 

 

I've tried setting the fme_fill_color attribute on the desired features but it didn't have any effect.

 

 

Has anyone been able to achieve anything like this?

 

 

I'm using FME 2013 SP3.

 

 

thanks,

 

Nic

 

sigtill
Contributor
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  • sigtillContributor
  • Contributor
  • August 8, 2013
Have a look at this post:

 

http://evangelism.safe.com/fmeevangelist115/

 

 

 Notice how you access these - through the actual attribute definitions. I imagine we do it like this because you wouldn’t want to set format attributes for every individual feature/cell. In this dialog you can set the format of a cell to be simple (e.g. red font, yellow fill) or can be more complex by using a custom definition. For example this custom string:

 
 [Green];[Red];[Magenta];[Blue]
 

 …means colour positive numbers green, negative numbers red, zero is magenta, and strings are blue. The syntax for these strings is defined by Excel (it’s not an FME construction) and you can find more information in the Excel Help system.

The real SigTill
nic_ran
Contributor
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  • nic_ranContributor
  • Contributor
  • August 9, 2013
Thanks Sig,

 

I've looked at that post in detail but it doesn't help with what I'm trying to do.

 

1. Setting attributes in this way only applies to columns (attribute definitions)

 

2. The custom colours only set the font colour and not the background/fill colour

 

3. Using the "Simple" format option I can set the fill colour but not the format mask

 

thanks,

 

Nic

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