OpenOffice.org and the LibreOffice branch both suffer from an apparent restriction – the color palette appears to be severely limited. By default, you’re given a small palette of ~106 colors for everything from highlighting and borders to fill and font coloring.

Luckily, adding a custom color is no big deal – it just happens to be buried deep within the UI. So, color up your palette by following the steps below:

From within any program (Calc, Writer, etc.) in either office suite, go ahead and click Tools > Options in the top menu bar.

Go ahead and open the top left navigation element (actually, it is usually already open for you) and then click the child element Colors.

Enter in a name for your custom color where it says “Name” and then proceed to enter the RGB or CMYK values to the right. Once you see the color that you want in the lower color box, click the Add button.

You can add whichever colors you’d like this way – just make sure they have unique names or you’ll get an error. Colors added here will be available throughout the entire office suite.

[Deleting custom colors is also straightforward from here, simply select any color you want to delete from the drop-down menu and then click on Delete.]