Interrupting native functions

[JRosten]

Hi all,

I'm trying to change the "automatic" font colour to my company standard colour in Excel 2016. It seems it used to be possible to set this colour in Windows "Personalise" in previous versions of Windows, but Windows 10 works differently and doesn't allow this any more. VBA seems to think the automatic colour is constant, so I can't change the colour itself (correct me if I'm wrong).

So my current idea is to figure out how Excel calls the VBA font changing function, interrupt it and add a bit of code after its execution which changes it to the colour I want if the automatic colour was chosen (the icon will still show black, but the text will be my colour). I seem to recall being able to interrupt the InsertFootnoteNow function in Word VBA, is something similar possible with Excel?

If this doesn't work, my next plan is to hide the home tab, recreate it completely in the CustomUI tool and point the colour picker to a different macro, but that seems like overkill, and I don't know if the home tab is completely reproducible.

I'm interested in answers to my specific question (how to hijack a function call from the ribbon) as well as other solutions to my problem regarding the automatic font colour. This is meant to be used by other people (in particular ones who are used to using the automatic font colour) so it's not as easy as just creating another button or telling people to use the specific theme colour. But also, knowing how to hijack the function call would also be useful to know.

Cheers

 

[Norie]

Couldn't you change the font colour of the Normal style?

 

[JRosten]

Couldn't you change the font colour of the Normal style?

The normal style is already the right colour. In practice the problem is not to get something that works, but to make it intuitive for users who haven't gone through specific training. An untrained user will often think that what they want to do is change the colour of the text, go to the font colour picker and select the large, eye catching option (with a name that sort of implies "default") and end up with a different colour to the one in the rest of the document.

I'm actually more interested in solving the equivalent problem in Word (where "remove formatting" is a less commonly used function), but I reckon the solution will be the same in both applications.