How to get the RGB or CMYK slider options in "more colors" for Office for Mac 2011?

Question

I have a problem with Mac Word 2011 and the fact that the 'more colors' option only brings up the color wheel and no RGB or CMYK slider options? I have tried all weekend to remedy with a number of clean installs of 2011 (after just dragging the old program icons to the trash) and software updates and the result is the same. I need the RGB option for specific color selections.

Could this be a font conflict or is there a hidden check box somewhere? Some observations:

• My laptop at home displays the RGB and CMYK slider all fine etc... with the same software installed.
• On the troublesome computer, where in Word the options are missing, the same dialog shows fine in Excel.
• There is no oval toolbar button in the top right, like older versions of OS X had:

• Pressing Command+Shift+T (which for some other applications apparently toggles the toolbar) only raises a beep and does nothing.
• The view menu is completely greyed out when colors are selected, and there is no show/hide option on my menus if it wasn't.
• The odd thing is that the cancel box on the first attached picture slightly overlaps the color selected box which makes me think this is an OS issue on installation.

Missing toolbar in Word on the left, but all fine in Excel on the same computer:

Solution 1

This issue was fixed by the following. Delete the "normal" template located in Documents/Microsoft User Data. Secondly, the preference for Word needs deleting. Open the library folder by holding the alt key under the "Go" menu. Go to preferences/com.microsoft.Word.plist and delete the file. Empty wastebasket and restart the computer. All worked for me.

Solution 2

Take a look please: Working with RGB Colors in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac

Here click the Color Sliders button:

Click on the Gray Scale Slider option:

This brings up a drop-down menu. Within the drop-down menu select the RGB Sliders option:

Comments

[Doug Urquhart]

I have attached 2 pics of windows within Office 2011. The Word window has no options for show/hide colors top right and the Excel has all the color options visible. The Excel window doesn't have the button to show hide though! I think that I might need a complete clean install of Office as I think there are latent files hidden somewhere within my computer as I have installed Office around 3 times to no effect, but this is just by dragging the old program icons to the trash. /Users/doug1/Desktop/Word colors.tiff /Users/doug1/Desktop/Excel

[Doug Urquhart]

The Command+Shift+T keys only raise a beep and do nothing. The view menu is completely greyed out when colors are selected and there is no show/hide option on my menus if it wasn't. The odd thing is that the cancel box on the attached picture slightly overlaps the color selected box which makes me think this is an OS issue on installation.

[Arjan]

I guess the OP has hidden the toolbar. Either by clicking the toolbar button in the top right corner, or using some "Show/hide Toolbar" option in the View menu, or pressing Command+Shift+T.

[Arjan]

Nice. For future users running into the same issue: were the two screenshots from the same computer? And if you ever run into it again you might want to peek into the property list to see if there's any clue in there.

[Doug Urquhart]

The two screenshots were from the same computer in different programs. The one with the error is from Word and the good one was from Excel. Incidentally, the color palette can be resized, hence the difference in gif size but it is there to highlight the difference in the color palette options in the menu bar.