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Pantone's 2017 'Color of the year' in Office

Another festive season (marketing) tradition is the Pantone ‘Color of the Year’ which gets a lot of media coverage.

It gives us an excuse to explain how to convert (as best you can) a Pantone color into something to use in Microsoft Office.

Pantone colors don’t have a direct match in Office because Pantone is for printed materials while Office works on-screen.  But you can get fairly close.

Last year, Pantone cheated and announced two colors for 2016.  Of course, everyone followed their advice and used the colors throughout 2016 (not).

All this is ‘official’ because it comes from the ‘Pantone Color Institute’ (sigh).

2017’s color is called ‘Greenery’ which is described as, we kid you not

A life-affirming shade … emblematic of the pursuit of personal passions and vitality”

We’re more inclined to call ‘Sickly Green’

Neither the name nor the Pantone code 15-0343 are understood by Office.

With a little digging around the Pantone web site we found there’s more than one Greenery!  There’s a version for printing on cotton (TC/TCX) and two variations for paper printing; TPX and an environmentally friendly TPG version.

Here are the RGB and HTML codes to use in Office for both paper variations.  The difference between the two is minor, if you can tell the difference at all.

Pantone Greenery 15-0343 TPX

RGB  145 181 77     HEX/HTML  91B54D

Pantone Greenery 15-0343 TPG

RGB 146 180 87      HEX/HTML 92B558

In Office go to the Custom color selector for fonts, backgrounds etc. and enter the RGB values:

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