6 Examples of How to Colorize Text of Excel Cells/Rows/Cols by openpyxl

In this tutorial, we will show you a few examples of setting the text color of cells, rows, and columns with openpyxl library.

Styling Excel rows using openpyxl

You can apply various style properties to the Excel sheets as working with openpyxl library.

For example, setting the font name like Verdana, Arial etc.

Similarly, font face like Bold, Italic.

Setting the text color is also possible.

In this tutorial, we will show you a few examples of setting the text color of cells, rows, and columns with openpyxl library.

For all our examples below, we will use the following sample sheet:

Excel-Style-Sample

An example of setting text color of a cell

Let us start with a simple example of setting the text color from default to others.

For that, we take the Cell numbers B5, C5, and D5.

To change the colors of cells, follow these steps:

Step 1:

Import Workbook and Font from openpyxl:

from openpyxl import load_workbook

from openpyxl.styles import Font

Step 2:

Load the workbook:

wb_style = load_workbook('test_Excel.xlsx')

(Set the path of yours)

Step 3:

Specify active sheet to the sheet object:

sheet = wb_style.active

Step 4:

Assign cells and styles as follows:

cell_1 = sheet["B5"]

cell_1.font = Font(color="00FF8000")

Note: You have to use aRGB hex values for the color.

Step 5:

Save the workbook:

wb_style.save("test_Excel.xlsx")

That’s it.

Following is the complete code to change three cell colors and its output:

# Color the row text example

from openpyxl import load_workbook

from openpyxl.styles import Font

#Loading the Workbook

wb_style = load_workbook('test_Excel.xlsx')

#Accessing Active Sheet

sheet = wb_style.active

cell_1 = sheet["B5"]
cell_1.font = Font(color="FF8000")

cell_2 = sheet["C5"]
cell_2.font = Font(color="800000")

cell_3 = sheet["D5"]
cell_3.font = Font(color="#0000FF")


wb_style.save("test_Excel.xlsx")

Result:

Excel-Style-Color

Changing the color of whole row example

Rather than changing a cell color one by one you may change the color of a complete row. For that, we will use the iter_rows function and specify the min_row and max_row as shown in the example below.

The program below will change the color of the second row – which is below the headers.

The code:

# Change color of whole row
from openpyxl import load_workbook
from openpyxl.styles import Font

#Loading the Workbook

wb_style = load_workbook('test_Excel.xlsx')

#Accessing Active Sheet
sheet = wb_style.active

for rows in sheet.iter_rows(min_row=2, max_row=2, min_col=1):
   for cell in rows:
     cell.font = Font(color="00FF00")

wb_style.save("test_Excel.xlsx")

Result:

Excel-color-row

You can see the green color for the second row.

Changing many rows color example

The example below changes the row color from 2 to 6:

Python program:

# Change color of whole row
from openpyxl import load_workbook
from openpyxl.styles import Font

#Loading the Workbook
wb_style = load_workbook('test_Excel.xlsx')

#Accessing Active Sheet
sheet = wb_style.active

for rows in sheet.iter_rows(min_row=2, max_row=6, min_col=1):
   for cell in rows:
     cell.font = Font(color="804000")

wb_style.save("test_Excel.xlsx")

Result:

Excel-color-rows

Changing color of every other row (even rows)

In this example, we will change the text color of even rows i.e. every other row. Odd rows color remains the same as in the sample sheet while even rows color is changed to light green color.

This is done by getting the current row index and continue statement of Python.

See the code logic and result below:

The code:

# Change color of whole row
from openpyxl import load_workbook
from openpyxl.styles import Font

#Loading the Workbook
wb_style = load_workbook('test_Excel.xlsx')


#Accessing Active Sheet
sheet = wb_style.active

for rows in sheet.iter_rows(min_row=2, max_row=12, min_col=1):
   for cell in rows:
       if int(rows[0].row) % 2 == 0:
           print('Row number:', str(rows[0].row))
           cell.font = Font(color="00FF00")
           continue
wb_style.save("test_Excel.xlsx")

Resultant sheet:

Excel-color-even

Similarly, you may change the odd rows text color by modifying this line of code:

if int(rows[0].row) % 2 != 0:

Solution # 2 for even/odd row text coloring

Alternatively, you may use this code which is simpler and does not use a continue statement:

The code:

# Change color of whole row
from openpyxl import load_workbook
from openpyxl.styles import Font

#Loading the Workbook
wb_style = load_workbook('test_Excel.xlsx')

#Accessing Active Sheet
sheet = wb_style.active

for rows in sheet.iter_rows(min_row=2, max_row=12, min_col=1):

   for cell in rows:

       if not cell.row % 2:

           cell.font = Font(color="FF0000")

wb_style.save("test_Excel.xlsx")

and for odd rows coloring, modify this line of if statement:

if cell.row % 2:

Changing a column text color example

By using iter_cols function, you may change the partial or entire column color as well.

See the program below where we changed the color of the second column only.

Python Code:

# Change color of whole row
from openpyxl import load_workbook
from openpyxl.styles import Font

#Loading the Workbook
wb_style = load_workbook('test_Excel.xlsx')

#Accessing Active Sheet

sheet = wb_style.active

#Using iter_cols to change column color

for rows in sheet.iter_cols(min_col=2, max_col=2, min_row=2, max_row=None):

   for cell in rows:

     cell.font = Font(color="408080")

wb_style.save("test_Excel.xlsx")

Result:

Excel-color-columns

In the code we specified:

min_col=2

As we wanted to change the second column color only. If we specified 1, first column would have changed as well.

max_col=2

Again, as we wanted to change the color of only the second column. If we used 4, then the code had changed 2,3 and 4 column text color.

min_row=2

Its value is set as 2 as we wanted to change the color after the header row.