Tips and Frequently Asked Questions

  Changing the background color of a cell in FlexCel


It can be confusing that the code to change the background of a cell is something like:

fmt1.FillPattern.Pattern := TFlxPatternStyle.Solid;
fmt1.FillPattern.FgColor := $00BCE4D8;

Why are we changing the FgColor instead of the BgColor in order to change the background color? And why does changing BgColor has no effect?

It can be a little confusing because of the names (which are the same the Excel documentation uses), but you need to understand that both FgColor and BgColor refer to the background color of a cell, and that’s why both are properties of the FillPattern. The foreground color is changed by changing the font color.

The thing is, in Excel, cells don’t need to have a solid fill, they can have a pattern fill. For example, here you have a “grid” pattern, where the foreground of the pattern is red, and the background of the pattern is yellow:


So, in FlexCel “FgColor” and “BgColor” both refer to the fill of the cell (never the foreground which as said is Font.Color). For the special case of Pattern = Solid (what we use in the 99.999% of the cases), then you set the FillPattern.Pattern to Solid, and BgColor doesn’t really matters. You can think of “Solid” as a pattern where everything is covered by the foreground color. The BgColor is still there, but not visible because FgColor covers all. If you set any other pattern than solid, you’ll see it more clearly.


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What our customers say

We had a very positive Flexcel talk in our meeting yesterday. Dave Martel was very positive about the product; the support; speed to fix an issue. By doing the talk he realised improvements over the years and has an amazing success story from analysing a large number of human created spreadsheets (1000’s of spreadsheets with 1000’s of readings). The speed of analysis allowed them to refine and re-train the importer to deal with human vagaries (comments / colour etc).

- Jason Chapman

Wow, I'm really impressed that you found this out in such a short time! Thanks especially for testing it with Softmaker Office itself and with some more elaborate spreadsheets, this makes me confident that it'll work with the "real life" files that I have to handle. Super service!

- Arthur Hoornweg

It's now very easy to build a report with the new Flexcel + Aurelius integration. It was so easy that I really thought I was doing something wrong. I will never go back to a report generator, Flexcel is way cooler and easier for reports

- Eduardo Elias

Another vote for Flexcel here, since the rewritten and updated Flexcel came out a year or two ago, I only use that. Mostly I use it to read XLS and XLSX files, which it does much faster and more flexibly than Excel automation, in my experience. If you also need to write XLS and XLSX files (which I do occasionally) Flexcel has the most amazing utility named 'ApiMate'. You can design your output report in Excel, including only a minimum of actual data, but with all the detailed formatting, headings, and column, row and cell properties you need. Then point ApiMate at the Excel file, and it generates a Delphi program to write the entire XLS file using the Flexcel API, with all the attributes matching those you created in Excel itself. It is then the work of a few moments to adapt the ApiMate-created functions to handle your real data. Magic! Flexcel support is prompt and helpful, too.

- Tim Frost

Thanks for an excellent product. I did have some issues Friday but these were expertly solved by Adrian Gallero over the weekend. I cannot recommend you products and service high enough. Thanks and kind regards

- Kevin Clegg

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