How to Modify the Excel Sheet Tab’s Color (Easy Steps)

Excel’s sheet tabs are all the same color by default (white when the sheet tab is active and grey for all the non-active tabs).

Giving a worksheet tab a particular color is helpful for people who utilize a lot of worksheet tabs. This could be helpful for grouping related tabs together (for example, all tabs for a specific year or about a specific product can be shown in the same color).

Additionally, you can use it to highlight a particular tab by changing its color (such as a summary tab or dashboard tab).

I’ll briefly demonstrate how to alter the color of the sheet tab in Excel in this little tutorial. I’ll demonstrate how to accomplish this for a single sheet at a time and do it all at once for a group of grouped sheets.

This instruction explains:

One Sheet Tab or Color Change
Toggle Multiple Sheet Tab Colors
alter/remove the color of the sheet tab

One Sheet Tab or Color Change:

I want to modify the color of the first sheet tab on the five sheets below (named Sheet1).

The steps are as follows:

To alter the sheet tab’s color, perform a right-click.
Hover your cursor over the “Tab Color” choice in the menu that appears. On the right, more color selections will be displayed.

3. Decide whatever color you wish to use for the sheet tab.

4. When finished, you’ll notice that the chosen colour has been added to your sheet tab.

Be aware that depending on whether the sheet tab is enabled or not, its colour will change.

You will see the sheet in the precise assigned colour that you choose in Step 3 if it is not active. Additionally, if it’s turned on, you’ll see that the colour is displayed in a gradient (and the intensity of the colour is reduced).

Sheet tab color when the sheet is not active

You can select the “More Colors” option if you want to utilize a color other than those previously displayed in the step 3 selections. With the colors dialogue box now open, you can select a color or enter its RGB or hexadecimal code.

Note:

Selecting the “Format” option under the “Home” tab will also give you access to the tab colour choice (which is in the Cells group). When you place your cursor over the “Tab Color” option, it will appear in the drop-down menu, and you may select the colour from there.

Toggle Multiple Sheet Tab Colors:

You don’t have to do it one at a time if you need to give the same color to several page tabs.

The same sheet tab colour can be assigned to all of the selected sheets at once in Excel.

I want to give the same color to the top three sheet tabs in the workbook below. It has five pages.

The steps are as follows:

Click the tab for the first sheet (the one on the left)
Click the final sheet tab you wish to be part of the group while holding down the SHIFT key. That would be Sheet3 in this illustration. By doing this, all sheets between Sheet1 and Sheet3 will be selected.

3. Right-click Sheet3

4. Select the colour you wish to give these tabs by placing the cursor over the “Tab Color” option and choosing from the palette of colours that appears.

5. [Very Significant] Ungroup sheets by performing a right-click on any of the tabs.

The aforementioned procedures would give each of the chosen sheets the same colour.

You should be aware of the following when doing this:

You cannot have any sheets between those that need to be allocated the same color because this method only works for paired sheets.
Excel groups these sheets when you choose the first sheet, hold down the SHIFT key, and then select the last sheet. You must remember that we ungrouped these sheets in Step 5, which you must do. Any changes you make to any of the sheets will also affect the other grouped sheets if you don’t do this (which is not desired in most cases)

Alter/remove the colour of the sheet tab:

The colour of the sheet tab can be easily changed or removed.

You must choose a different colour or select the option to delete the current colour, then follow the same instructions you used when applying the colour.

The steps to modify/remove the colour of the sheet tab are as follows:

Right-click the sheet tab you wish to get rid of the colour from (or change the existing color)
Place the ‘Tab Color’ option under your cursor.
To eliminate the sheet tab colour, select “No Color” from the menu that appears (or choose another colour in case you want to change the existing sheet tab color)

You can group many sheets together by clicking on the first sheet while holding down the SHIFT key, then clicking on the last sheet, and then remove the colour by following the instructions above. This will allow you to remove the colour from numerous sheets at once.

Remember to separate the sheets once you’re finished.

I demonstrated in this lesson how to rapidly alter the tab colour for a single sheet tab or a collection of sheets. Additionally, I explained how to alter or remove a sheet’s existing tab colour.