The World is not Just Black and White with Ideate Sticky!

Every day, our Ideate Software Support team fields all types of questions from AECO professionals all around the world. You can review some of these recent question and answers via our Ideate Software Support Series blog category.

Thousands of Revit users all around the world use Ideate Sticky every day to combine the ease and flexibility of Excel, Word, and PDF editing with the convenience of a sticky note. Ideate Sticky elegantly connects non-BIM data from an Excel, Word, or PDF document into Revit projects, enhancing cross-team workflows.

A recent customer contacted us to ask why the cell fill color and the colored text in Excel was displaying only black and white when they linked the Excel file into Revit as a Sticky schedule.

Several situations can prevent the desired colors from displaying within Revit.

1. Excel may have an override Black and White setting selected within the Sheet tab of the Page Setup dialog. This will cause any Excel file to be black and white within either a Schedule or Image for Ideate Sticky. It’s important to understand that this setting will override any color setting you may have selected within Ideate Sticky Images method shown below.
   
   
   Access the Page Setup – Print Settings dialog within Excel to review Sheet settings to ensure the Black and White override is not selected.
    
2. If you are using the Images method within Ideate Sticky, there are additional settings to override the Excel, PDF, or Word document to Black and White or Grayscale. You can also make the background transparent which is extremely useful when you have multiple images on a view or sheet that are close to each other.
   
   
   For Ideate Sticky Images method, there are additional color, greyscale, and transparent settings.
    
3. Conditional formatting is currently not supported within the Ideate Sticky Schedules method. Color fills, text overrides, etc., that are a result of conditional formatting will be ignored. The underlying cell formatting, which can be seen when you place your cursor within the cell, will be utilized instead.   However, this conditional formatting is now supported within the Ideate Sticky Images method. 

Here is an excellent blog post on color fills that was written before we introduced our Ideate Sticky images method. All the information within this blog is still valid for the Ideate Sticky Schedules method. If you want to see the conditional formatting, you should now use the Ideate Sticky Images method instead.

At the end of the day, this specific customer had the override Black and White checkbox selected within Excel. Unchecking that selection within Excel produced the desired colors within the Ideate Sticky schedule.

Keep those amazing questions coming to [email protected] and we will keep answering them!

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About the Author

Richard W. Taylor, Associate AIA – Technical Evangelist 
Richard has more than 30 years of experience working for companies that develop architectural and engineering software solutions, such as Intergraph, Bentley, and Autodesk. He has over 20 years of Revit experience, and he was part of the original development of Revit while at Revit Technology Corporation. He worked for 12 years at Autodesk, where he presented, taught, and worked to improve features in Revit. Richard holds both a Bachelor of Science in Architectural Studies and Master of Architecture from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. As Technical Evangelist, Richard works with AECO clients worldwide, developing and consulting on BIM solutions. Find Richard on Twitter and LinkedIn.