Two even easier methods:

1. If you have just filled a cell with a color (it is your last action), you
can use F4 to fill another cell with the same color.

2. On the Tables and Borders toolbar, the Fill Color button will reflect the
last-used color.

I had hoped that copying/pasting format using Ctrl+Shift+C/Ctrl+Shift+V
would work, but apparently not for shading.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
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all may benefit.

"Mango" wrote in message
...
Thank you both for your input. I found that within the same table you can
apply custom colors to a cell by first clicking on a cell that already
contains the color, (of course this means the color will have to have been
manually created in the file already). Then open the Tables and Borders
menu
and click on the drop down arrow on the Shading Color icon, then More Fill
Colors..., which if all goes well, opens up the Colors pane with the
Custom
tab pre-selected and your custom color pre-loaded at the lower right.
Click
OK and you'll notice the little bar of color on the Shading Color icon is
now
your custom color. Now you can click in a cell or row, or whatever, then
click on the Shading Color icon( the icon, not the arrow) and your color
is
applied to that cell, row, etc. Sometimes, however, when you select a cell
containing the color you want, clicking More Fill Colors...doesn't take
you
to the Custom tab pane with the color pre-loaded, but the Standard tab
pane
with nothing pre-loaded. I don't know why this happens. The above method
may
seem tedious, but it's better than manually entering RGB values from a
list.
All the same you should probably save lists of custom colors in a file
within
the same folder as your tables. As mentioned before this method only works
to
move existing custom color around in a table. The colors have to be
created
manually in a new table or exported in by copying a file aleady containing
the colors. It would be nice if we could save these colors to a user
definable pallete for each file, as the standard palette may be fine for
font, but is limited when using shading.

"Cindy M -WordMVP-" wrote:

Hi ?B?TWFuZ28=?=,

I made some custom colors for backround shading in tables, but I have
to
manually enter the RGB values each time I want to use one. Is there
no
option to save them for quick retrieval?

Short of recording making the settings in a macro, no.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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