Take Control of Numbers

Color Controls

What a long way we’ve come from the black-and-white world of the early Mac and the first spreadsheet program it had from Microsoft—Multiplan! (Didn’t see that coming, did you?)

In fact, we’ve come so far that dealing with the various color-picking options in Numbers gets its own short chapter, since they are myriad, almost everywhere in Numbers (for tables, cells, charts, lines, shapes, and even text), and not always intuitive.

After a tour of the Numbers “color well” approach to choosing colors, I’ll show you how to work in the Colors Window, a standard Mac interface element that you’ve probably not explored to its fullest. With that under your belt, we’ll look at Gradient Fills and at Custom Fills so you don’t have to recreate ...