I need a monitor that can be seen when there is a bright window behind it.

I just moved into a new office and the sun shines into the windows all morning. The layout of the office requires that the monitor be in front of the floor to ceiling window and even with the verticle blinds closed, the bright light behind the monitor makes it hard to see. I use a lot of spreadsheets, so my clients and I are looking at a mostly white screen that is heavily backlit by the sun. Very hard on the eyes for morning meetings.

I currently use a Dell FP1907 and I'm wondering if there is a different flat panel monitor that can handle being backlit.

Thanks!

Why not change the default background and text colors in the spreadsheets. In MS Excel you can make the background and text any color on the palette. Experiement a little. A brighter screen will just hurt your eyes more.

If you are in the UK complain bitterly to your companies Health and Safety representative. Having a window behind a computer screen contravenes Health and Safety regulations, after all it is your eyesight that is at risk.

http://www.hse.gov.uk/workers/safet...

Stuart

OtheHill, please explain your suggestion a little further.

AFAIK, there is no option to change the default background color in Excel 2003. Yes, we can use the fill option on the entire spreadsheet, but this would impact the fill colors that we already use in certain cells.

Another option is a single color background, which could be applied via VBA upon opening the files. We're talking about thousands of spreadsheets for hundreds of clients so it's not something wwe would want to do manually. However, that would only help with the Excel problem, not any other program with a light background.

I know I only mentioned Excel, but in practice there are many other times that this problem occurs, from Office apps to the web to some corporate apps that we use.

My thought was that a monitor that could handle the backlight would would be a one-size-fits-all-apps, automatic solution.

You might be right about a brighter monitor but I don't think so. There is a limit to haw bright it can be before that in itself will be bothersome or worse.

To elaborate on changing colors on the display. I am assumming you already know how to change the color of text? In Excel, as well as many other programs you can change the background color too.

An extreme example would be to have white text on a black background. The only part of the screen that changes is the actual work area of the program.

In Excel the controls to do that are located in the upper right corner of an opened spreadsheet. The controls are called the font color and the fill color. Run you cursor over the buttons located at the top/ right and stop at those two names. Type a "how to" question in the dialog box in the Excel help files.

OtheHill,

Thanks for the instructions on changing the fill color, but just to give you an idea of my level of Excel experience, please see some of my responses to Excel related questions in the Office Software section of this forum. To steal a quote from "The Guns of Will Sonnet": No brag, just fact. ;-)

As I said in my previous response, "Yes, we can use the fill option on the entire spreadsheet, but this would impact the fill colors that we already use in certain cells." In other words, if I use a dark fill color in each cell, I would lose the fill colors already used in individual cells.

AFAIK, the only way to change the background color of a spreadsheet without impacting the fill color of individual cells would be to use Format...Sheet...Background and insert a single color jpg file as a background. I have created such a file and experimented with it. While it works fairly well, it only addresses the Excel issue *and* would need to be done on each spreadsheet the next time it was opened.

The search for a one-size-fits-all solution continues!

Thanks again.

Actually once you create a template for Excel I believe you can make it your default. Any files already created would need to be manually changed. Didn't think about the problem with shading certain cells.

Back to your original question about brightness. I do think there is a limit to how bright you can get but I think that you can adjust most LCD displays to be brighter than normal.

A better solution might be to change the window treatment to get something that blocks more light.

Yeah, we're going to wait until Monday morning and play with the monitor's color and brightness settings to see if we can get something workable. We're only going to be in these offices for a few months and then we're moving again.

We've been considering replacing the monitors a bigger ones, and then the move added this brightness issue to the mix, so I thought I could justify bigger monitors more readily if I also knew of a model that would solve the brightness problem.

Thanks again for all your hewlp.