Change selected cell indicator colour (Calc)

[Fabian42]

It’s nearly impossible to see which cell is selected if the background colour of the selected cell and the ones around it is black, apart from holding two rulers to the screen and checking with the highlight at the top and left. How do I change this colour?

What I tried:

• Enabling “automatically detect high-contrast mode of operating system” in accessibility settings did of course nothing, because I don’t have such a theme active.
• Changing “document background” in “application colours” settings instead of editing the default style somewhat works, because the dark cursor is then much more visible, as a gap in the white grid lines, but that neither looks good, nor does it help for any case except if every sheet in every document is supposed to be dark themed. Not even I want that.
• This post has no working answers, is wrongly closed (as duplicate of an unrelated question) and was asked in 2012 (last active 2016).

[anon73440385]

Afaik no way doing this on LibreOffice application level, since highlight selected-color is determined by the operating system’s windows manager and its theme colorization.

[Fabian42]

It seems like LibreOffice actually adjusts even the displayed document colours to the system theme. Unless this breaks some documents (which were created on computers with light themes), leaving a dark theme enabled could actually be a solution then. With that, the cursor is visible. It’s a white border among white borders and seems thinner than in the white theme, but it is different enough from regular borders that the eye can jump to it fairly quickly. Edit: It only works with “detect high-contrast mode” enabled. And if that is on, then colouring cells manually no longer works, only conditional formatting/styles.

[analytical_prat]

I think the theme does make it cumbersome on many operating systems. However, I was able to get the darker cell borders when highlighted by changing the Font Color to black. This is found in Options -> Application Colors -> Font color. I am using KDE Plasma. See pictures attached. I hope this helps.

White Border

Black Border

[Fabian42]

Wow, that is weird! But since the font colour should usually be white anyway if the background is black, that’s fine. Thanks for finding out, too bad I mostly stopped using LibreOffice since then. But it will surely help others who find this post later.

[JWhite1]

Alternate Solution: Change the colour of the borders of all other cells. I usually use blue. The selected cell alone remains black! (i.e. Default style Border color: Blue)

[mapurves]

This is not a solution, rather a question on this same topic. We are volunteers transcribing weather from old Navy Logs for climate research. A couple of our transcribers are colour blind and we would like to change the colour around the selected cell. We have been using Calc since version 3 and, I think, some time in the past, we set the border to be blue. Some people cnnot see the blue and they would like to see it changed to yellow. I have followed various links on this question and saw the quote below. That changed the shade of the blue colour, but is there a way to change the colour to something else, or should I ask for an enhancement?

Blockquote
menu:Tools>Options… Advanced
[Open expert configuration …]
Put the single word TransparentSelection into the search box and search.
Double-click the line with TransparentSelection so the value switches from true to false.
Confirm dialogs with [OK]
Now the selections of text and table cells is highlighted in inverse colours as in the good old times of well made user interfaces.
P.S. IMHO, hiding a useful configuration option in the expert settings was a bad decision.

[EarnestAl]

You might like to look at this question, Asked Before: Calc ver 7.3.1.3 Highlighted Cell Color

It seems this is relatively easy to do in Mac and Linux but hard-baked into versions of Windows later than 7

[mapurves]

I did spend a considerable amount of time yesterday looking thorough all these links, but found no way to change the colour from blue to yellow, or any other colour.

[penz]

I found that the thin selection rectangle has to do with display scaling in windows. My screen resolution was set to 2560x1440 and scale was set to 170% and the selection rectangle was very thin, barely visible. I changed resolution to 1600x900 and scaling to 100%, now the selection rectangle is thick and easily visible.