Crystal Reports and the color orange

Monday 12 October 2009 @ 9:45 am

When you want to set the color of an object in a CR formula you can pick from one of the 15 default color words like CRRed or CRYellow. If you want an unlisted color you have to give the formula the three RGB values for the desired color.  For example Color ( 238 , 130 , 238) gives you violet.

One way find these values is using the color selector on the toolbar.  Drop down the selector and click “more’ to get what I call the “smear palette”.  This lets you click anywhere within a rainbow-like area and see the matching 3 numbers for the exact shade where you are clicking.  But what if you aren’t sure which flavor of ‘orange’ is really your basic orange?

A second approach is to go to a site like this one which maintains a color chart by NAME. That way, if you know that you want “dusty rose” you can just look up the name and get the numbers. This chart shows the  standard orange to be color (255 , 165 , 0).  Now you might think that color naming is subjective, but I checked several other charts and didn’t find any discrepancies.  For instance, all made the same exact distinction between “Bisque” (255/228/196) and “Blanched Almond” (255/235/205) although these colors are almost indistinguishable (at least to me).

Of the several sites that show colors with names, the list linked above has the longest list.  For other examples you can Google “RGB to color name”.








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