Excel in Dark Mode (Including Cells)

Hi, everyone! My name is Cristiano Galv?o, I'm 40 years old, and although I can consider my vision good, it's not like in my 18s anymore. Because of this and because I use computers for hours, I must take care of my eyes. A good thing to have, especially at night, is the dark mode.

although I can consider my vision good, it's not like in my 18s anymore

As you may know, Microsoft Excel has its dark mode, but unfortunately the cells are still white. I won't put the picture here, but try yourself and you will be so disappointed than I was when I tried the first time.

Let me show you how to achieve the effect of a true dark mode on Excel, with dark cells too. We are going to use Excel and PowerPoint to do this. Feel free to read the Excel part first if you are in a hurry.

Step 1 - PowerPoint and Shades of Grey ( ?° ?? ?°)

LOL, Shades of Grey... Sorry for the joke. Here you go with PowerPoint! We are here to prepare some gray images, and you will see how easy it is. Click on the Design tab, go to Format Background and click the Fill button. Try the third column of shades of gray.

On the left panel, click on the slide and press Ctrl+D a couple of times to duplicate it.

Now you go to each slide changing the background color to another gray.

Look:

Our goal is to finish the sequence with a good variety of shades. I think 5 is enough. You can create more if you want.

Let's save the images. It's possible to save 1 by 1, but here you will get it done easily. Just save them as PNG (Portable Network Graphics) format. Make sure you write a name that will be easy to remember. Make sure to save ALL slides too.

When you do this, PowerPoint will save all slides inside a new folder. I know, I know, this is an Excel tutorial... We are done with PowerPoint here.

Step 2 - You Have the Files

If you are curious about the size of these pictures, they occupy just 1 KB.

I don't like the "SlideX" names. You don't really need to rename them, but I will give you 2 options to do that. The first one is by selecting them and renaming one. Just press F2, write "gray" and press Enter. Windows will take care of the numbers (Did you know this trick? Tell me in the comments).

The other way is using the Command Prompt to rename the files, using the REN command as below. See how I renamed the files here:

Don't you see the command, right? Don't worry. I don't want to go deep on this because a mistake here can be dangerous, and I still have a third and better way. Let's keep this topic of renaming files to another article. It's time to open Excel!

Step 3 - Changing Background on Excel

Straight to the point: Go to the Page Layout tab and click Background:

From a File...

...and there you go! Dark cells!

Maybe you don't like this gray. Ok. Just press Delete Background and change it.

Step 4 - Office

Easy, easy, easy: Just go to File, Options, and find the Office Theme, where you can switch it to Dark Gray:

Much better, isn't it?

Try other combinations as well. I like this one, because I don't need to change the font colors to white when using it:

Try black too. Just remember of the fonts:

Final Thoughts

Maybe you could tweak it a little bit if you change the color of the Gridlines: File, Options, Advanced, Gridline color. I didn't find an excellent result here, but give a try:

Remember to test different combinations of schemas, backgrounds, and gridlines:

Without Patience to the PowerPoint Thing? Don't Worry!

If you are lazy today to do the PowerPoint steps, just download the background files directly from here:

https://www.excelturbo.com.br/downloads/darkmode.zip

No name and e-mail are required, but feel free to take a look on my article about Power Query at https://excelturbo.com.br and consider to subscribe to get several Excel news in a weekly basis. See you there!