Is there a simple way to choose the background color of one cell and make another cell the same color?ġ) Select the cell with the desired color.ģ) Click on the color with the box around it.ħ) If another cell needs the same color, simply repeat steps #4 and #5.ģ) The color is not identified within the palette, so try something elseġ1) Hunt for the color with the same name as step #7 and select it.ġ3) If another cell needs the same color, Background Color button has changed back to No Fill instead of Blue 3.or was it Blue 4? Darn it! Goto step #1. If I use the Format Painter button, the background color changes, but it also messes up the font name, font color, font size, bold, italic, and alignment, all of which I wanted to remain unchanged. Nothing fancy, just the copy the color and nothing else.

I want to manually change the background color of one cell to be the same as another cell. xls format for compatibility with my Excel 2003 computers.) Here's my workaround: Select cell in question, hit any character to replace contents of the cell. It really should have a one-step shortcut, but to my knowledge, it doesn't. I'm having difficulty doing in Calc what was a very simple task within Excel. The great thing about copying the contents of the cell rather than the cell itself is to grab the contents without any formatting (plain text). I'm new to OpenOffice after using Excel 2003 almost daily for years.