Mac PowerPoint: Setting Colors Accurately in 2025 – Best Practices

Posted on by - Updated on March 28, 2025

Here’s the scenario: in PowerPoint for Mac, you’re setting colors accurately in the color picker. You’re entering only RGB or Hex values on the RGB Sliders pane of the color picker, because you know that PowerPoint only stores colors in RGB/Hex, not CMYK. (You did know that, right?) Nut when you windows users open the file, they see csome colors that have different values and a different appearance. What’s going on here?

You’re experiencing a problem with mandatory color management. We’re living in an era when computer manufacturers have decided they know better than us what we want. When I first wrote about this problem in 2015, it was possible to download a non-color managed panel for the macOS color picker that would give you exactly the RGB values that you chose. Mac PowerPoint: Accurate Colors – Best Practices

But those color pickers have gone away and I can’t find anything to replace them. (If someone finds one, please let me know!) So here’s my next-best suggestion:

The Current Best Solution to Setting Colors Accurately in 2025

If you are creating PowerPoint files that will be used by Windows users, you should set your display to use the same default color management profile that is used in Windows. In System Settings>Displays, set the Color Profile dropdown to sRGB IEC61966-2.1. Then, when setting the color theme values in PowerPoint, click on the three-dot icon beside the RGB Sliders and set the profile there to sRGB IEC61966-2.1 as well. Then set the color values and save the PowerPoint file.

In testing, this approach is mostly accurate. Out of 6 accent colors, only one green value was shifted, from 90 to 89. All the colors had the same values when opened in PowerPoint for Windows. Please keep in mind that when this file is viewed on a system that uses a different color management profile, the RGB values will change. But I don’t see any way to prevent this in modern operating systems.

12:40 pm

2 thoughts on “Mac PowerPoint: Setting Colors Accurately in 2025 – Best Practices”

  1. Thanks John,
    FYI, the Color Profile dropdown only exists on external monitor, not on Built-in Display for a MacBook Pro running Apple silicon and MacOS Sequoia 15.3.2

    Reply

    • Perhaps that’s a MacBook peculiarity. We don’t have a MacBook Pro like that to test. It seems odd that Apple wouldn’t allow you to change the color profile. Here, on an Apple Silicon Mac Mini and an Intel MacBook Pro, both running Sequoia 15.3.2, we can set the color profile on all screens.

      Reply

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