Coloring cells in Excel with CMYK cell values

Question

I'm looking for a way possibly using VBA to apply a cell's fill value by looking at specified fields in the same record. This would be a sample tab delimited Excel sheet:

BEGIN_DATA_FORMAT
SampleID    SAMPLE_NAME CMYK_C  CMYK_M  CMYK_Y  CMYK_K  LAB_L   LAB_A   LAB_B

BEGIN_DATA                              
1   1   100 0   0   60  34.16   -19.52  -27.46
2   2   100 100 0   60  22.02   6.27    -23.25
3   3   100 0   0   0   54.56   -31.12  -45.29
END_DATA

Fields 3-6 each contain the values for CMYK respectively. I'd like to apply a cell background fill to field 1 by parsing each record for the combined CMYK values as a starting point.

Conversion to RGB or HSL may need to be done initially unless there's a backdoor method to set CMYK values in the Excel/Windows color picker.

Answer 1

this will give you the RGB from the CYMK in your data:

Function CYMK2RGB(c As Integer, y As Integer, m As Integer, k As Integer) As Long
Dim R As Integer
Dim G As Integer
Dim B As Integer
Dim colors As Integer

colors = 255 * (100 - k) / 100
R = colors * (100 - c) / 100
G = colors * (100 - m) / 100
B = colors * (100 - y) / 100

CYMK2RGB = RGB(R, G, B)
End Function

using range("A1").Interior.Color=cymk2rgb(...) will set the color - note it's not going to be an exact match, as CYMK is subtractive, and RGB is additive. this site: http://www.printernational.org/rgb-versus-cmyk.php has more details comparing the two.