Any Way to Redirect Color Selection to Something More Sophisticated Than Win's Ancient Default?

The "hex number" is just a hex representation of the Red, Green, Blue values.  So you can get all the same colors with the interface you showed, by entering values in those fields.

And when you find "special" colors you like you can save them as "Custom Colors" and they will show in Custom Colors area next time, and can be picked from there.

You can translate the hex color value to RGB here:

• Hex to RGB Color Converter

And you can see how the hex values are just RGB values in this example:

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»bp

I know that the Desktop Office apps (recent versions) use a very slightly different / newer version, not sure if that might be more to your liking.  Below is a bit of VBA code you could try in Excel to see it in action.

Sub PickColor()
    Dim ColorCode As Long
    Dim Red As Integer
    Dim Green As Integer
    Dim Blue As Integer
    
    ColorCode = Range("A1").Interior.Color
    
    Red = ColorCode Mod 256
    Green = (ColorCode \ 256) Mod 256
    Blue = ColorCode \ 65536
    
    If Application.Dialogs(xlDialogEditColor).Show(1, Red, Green, Blue) = True Then
        ColorCode = ActiveWorkbook.Colors(1)
        Range("A1").Interior.Color = ColorCode
    End If
End Sub

Select allOpen in new window

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»bp

Hi OT,

I haven't tried this myself yet, but it looks interesting:

How to activate and use Color Picker in Windows 10 PowerToys

If you give it a spin, let me know how it goes. Regards, Joe

I use this for decades :)

Version 4.1 is FREE
https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/colorpic.html

Hi ALL!

GREAT tools and suggestions!  

Is there a more root and branch approach?  I was thinking that this windows application must be the smallest program in the Windows portfolio.  Any way to simply install something on top of it - actually REPLACING the program with a more slick version of its own ancient self.

Sincerely,

OT

it is not a program, it is a control, a part of the system...
so it is not that easy to replace a part of the os...

Hi Bill,
What's your thinking behind not using it - stability?  Security risks?
Sincerely,
OT

I didn't like the interface, so it didn't seem like a big gain.  It's unsupported, so that's a risk naturally.  Also, while Windows doesn't always do things exactly the way I want, where possible using it's default tools and approaches has some value, in being consistent across applications, and even when working on a different computer.  For something as small as picking colors it wouldn't be worth trading in the standard Windows control for a "better" one.  But if selecting colors is a very frequent task for someone, and the Windows control isn't meeting their needs, then perhaps alternatives may make more sense than my use case.

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»bp

Hi OT,

In my previous post in this thread, I mentioned the Color Picker in Power Toys and gave you a link to an article on it. Another article about it hit my inbox today and I figured I'd pass it along to you:

How to Get a System-Wide Color Picker on Windows 10

Regards, Joe