I want to have an Excel report for a class schedule; each column in Excel is a day of the week, each row represents a half-hour interval - so that, for example, if a class is held for 2 hours, it would occupy four cells down. I was thinking to do it this way, to simulate that is currently already done manually in Excel.

The data would come from an Excel program; so far, I don't see any technical problems with Automation, etc.

Looking at the generated macro, I think I can assign a .ColorIndex from 1 to 40, representing 40 different colors. It doesn't look as if I can assign an arbitrary rgb() value. (Is this correct?)

The question I had was mainly, how could or should this be designed? For a start, I think that if a certain class (i.e., the same subject, for the same group of students) is held, for example, Monday and Thursday, I would like to color both cells with the same color.

Should I assign random colors each time I run the Excel report? Perhaps trying to to repeat colors (assuming there are less than 40 classes)? Should I let the user store the color index in the table, together with the student classes? Or perhaps pre-assign a random value in the table, but let the user change it? (I'll probably have to consult whether they want similar courses in the same color, e.g. different courses for "Computer Networking, Semester 4" in the same color).

Or is there a better way to do this?