Two different colour palettes on Mac numbers

When changing the color of text in a Numbers Spreadsheet, when I click on "Text Color" in the Format/text tab, for years I have always seen this selection of colors appear in a color palette:


After some software version update recently, the colors have changed to this dreadful selection of dull colors:


About half my spreadsheets have the first set of color selections and the other half have the 2nd set of color selections. Why is this? And how can I get the first set of color selections (above) to appear on all of my spreadsheets?


NOTE: I understand that I can click on the color wheel which will pop up a separate window that I then need to look for somewhere on my displays and select a color from that window, etc., ... but I don't want to go through 2 or three extra clicks every time I want to select a text color. I want to keep the original selection of colors, as show in the first color selection above.

MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 15.2

Posted on Jan 28, 2025 6:27 PM

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Posted on Jan 28, 2025 8:00 PM

Those are the colors from a 2007-2010 Excel document. The ones that have those colors were imported from Excel. If you want the native Numbers color palette, you'll have to create a new Numbers document then copy/paste everything from the imported Excel document. This is easy enough to do if it is all in one sheet. Copy/paste everything on the sheet to the new Numbers document all at the same time. If on multiple sheets, you need all related things (all tables or charts that reference each other) on one sheet before you copy/paste. You can do that with Cut/Paste in the imported Excel document. Then you can copy/paste to the new Numbers document.


I've not found a way to modify the palette any other way, unless there is a new feature since version 13.1.

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Jan 28, 2025 8:00 PM in response to photoerectus

Those are the colors from a 2007-2010 Excel document. The ones that have those colors were imported from Excel. If you want the native Numbers color palette, you'll have to create a new Numbers document then copy/paste everything from the imported Excel document. This is easy enough to do if it is all in one sheet. Copy/paste everything on the sheet to the new Numbers document all at the same time. If on multiple sheets, you need all related things (all tables or charts that reference each other) on one sheet before you copy/paste. You can do that with Cut/Paste in the imported Excel document. Then you can copy/paste to the new Numbers document.


I've not found a way to modify the palette any other way, unless there is a new feature since version 13.1.

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Two different colour palettes on Mac numbers

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