People do weird and wonderful things in Excel.

Other people then have to pull out the data from those spreadsheets.

“Other people”  tend to spend a lot of time crying into their coffee.

At the moment, I am trying to pull out data of a spreadsheet, where “something” can have a value of 1, 2 or 3. That is of course marked by an “x” in a cell. I need to convert that x to a number.

That is rather simple. What is not so simple, is that there can be two x’es. One, in black, to denote the current state of affairs. And a second x, in red, to denote what a future, state is wanted to be.

So – I need a way to get the color of an x. VBA can do that:

Function GetColour(ByVal Target As Range) As Single
Application.Volatile
GetColour = Target.Font.Color
End Function

And if I need a logical test:

Function IsBlack(ByVal Target As Range) As Boolean
Application.Volatile
If Target.Font.Color = 0 Then
IsBlack = True
Else
IsBlack = False
End If
End Function