I have used conditional formatting to apply a color scale to a range of values. Now I would like to permanently freeze those colors. I have poked around a bit, and can't find event the beginning of a method.
I think of it like paste values. We can either copy and paste formulas, which will be recalculated in their new positions, or we can copy and paste-values - which will just use the previously calculated values and never update them gain.
I want a "paste-values" version of the paintbrush - it would apply the values as they are currently calculated So where a cell previously was bright red because it was the smallest value in my range.
In my first example image, I have four cells, so clearly I could just manually set the colors. In my actual data, I want to copy the colors shown in the first row of my second image down to all the other rows:
And for my next trick, I want to something like that with an even bigger original range, so manually setting colors isn't really an option.
Any ideas? (Excel 2007)
In case anyone is curious, the reason I want to do this is so I can then use the tips here: http://datapigtechnologies.com/blog/index.php/automatically-set-chart-series-colors-to-match-source-cell-colors/ to create a scatter plot in which several dozen lines are given a couple of different smooth gradients - clusters of related lines will be colored similarly, but not identically. Along this theme, but with more lines in a couple of distinct color families: