Identifying current colour in Office 2007 products

[Boris]

I have a query in PowerPoint 2007 and Excel 2007.
Quite often, I want to pick a colour that matches some already existing
colour (perhaps created according to some pre-existing colour scheme). For
instance, this might be to inset text in the same colour as a graph series or
such like. It previous versions of office, if you selected an object (or a
series or whatever) and went to select the colour, the colour picker would
identify the current colour (so, if I wanted to match a colour, I could
identify the current colour of the object I wanted to match to, and then
select this colour for my new object). In office 2007 however, the colour
picker give the last colour the user selected and immediately changes the
colour of the selected object to this value. In other words, there is no
simple way (that I have as yet found) to identify a colour from an existing
element and select this for a new element (you can of course manually pick
all the colours from the existing swatches and then simply pick the same
swatch for objects you want to match - but I frequently would prefer to match
a colour I have not in the first instance selected manually). Are there any
ways that any one is aware of for doing this in PowerPoint 2007 (and / or
Excel 2007)? What I would really like is something like the colour picker
(pipette) too in Photoshop or the like...
Any suggestions would be very gratefully received.
I will be posting a similar message to the Excel forum so please excuse my
cross posting.
Many thanks and best wishes, Boris.

 

[Luc]

Boris,
I know of no colour picker in PPT, but maybe use one of these alternatives:
http://instant-eyedropper.com/
http://www.nattyware.com/pixie.html
http://www.pptxtreme.com/

 

[Boris]

Thanks for the information Luc. I will certainly try those out. Still looking
for a way to find what colour is being used for existing objects with Office
2007 (there must be some way of getting to that inofrmation) but, in the mean
time...
Thanks again and very best wishes, Boris

 

[Boris]

Hi Steve,
Thanks for the suggestion but, in sharts and the like at least, this will
work only once in any session (for the first object you pick). Thereafter,
the selected colour is always the last one you used, not the one applied to
the oject you have just picked (which also immediately gets changed to match
the last colour you picked for some other object)... That is the way it
always worked pre 2007 but I guess it has something to do with the "instant
prview" mode now running in Office 2007 (of which I am not abig fan)...
Thanks all the same.
Best wishes, Boris.

 

[Boris]

Hi again Luc,
Wow, I really like the tiny pixie utility (though it would be nice to be
able to copy something other than html colour codes). And Instant Eyedropper
is geat too. Didn't try pptxtreme firstly 'cause it is not free and secondly
because it is very large (in comparison) but really like the other two
utilities so many thanks indeed.
Best wishes, Boris.

 

[Boris]

Thanks Steve. Let me know if this gets progressed (and if it gets solved) -
or if you need extra information... Also, please be aware that Excel 2007
exhibits the same behaviur too.
Thanks again and best wishes, Boris.