Here’s a cryptic puzzle for those of you who like them: In Microsoft Word 2007 shade the background of a table cell with a custom colour. Close Word and re-open the document so that your custom colour is no longer in the ‘recently used colours’ list. How do you then shade another cell in the table with the same colour??

This seemingly simple task turns out to be more complicated than you’d expect. One answer is:

Use the “Reveal Formatting” pane (Shift F1) to inspect the existing shaded table cell to find out the RGB values of the shading, then use these values in selecting the custom colour for the new cell.

[This content was originally posted to Google Buzz, #133]