I have an issue with Excel 2013. The conditional formatting just will not work. I've got a VLOOKUP which pulls data from another worksheet. Then I want to use conditional formatting on that data. The conditions are =$N$3>30 to color the cell red and =$N$3<30 to color the cell green. It just stays permanently red or permanently green. I've tried every solution and possible work around I can think of and nothing works.
Does any one have any suggestions?
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Value in your N3 (or in column N), is a text thus color is red. Add double dash (--) to your VLookup function to convert the result to number. Your formula should be =IFERROR(--VLOOKUP(A3,... (complete the formula).
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I have an issue in Excel where conditional formatting produces different results if a subset of the characters in the cell have a different colour, depending on whether
the colour was applied with manual editing or using VBA
if applied with VBA, whether the range of coloured characters includes the first character in the cell
I am using Excel in Office 365 on Windows 10, both fully updated as of today.
In the screenshot below cells A1:A6 have the conditional formatting rule
=NOT(ISBLANK(B1))
In cells A2 and A3 I set first three characters to red by editing manually. In A3 the first three characters remain red when conditional formatting is triggered.
In cell A4 I set the first three characters to red text using the macro
Sub RedFirst()
ActiveCell.Characters(1, 3).Font.Color = vbRed
End Sub
Instead of getting the same result as A3 when conditional formatting is triggered, the first three characters turn green (the conditional format) instead of remaining red, and the rest of the text remains black instead of being green, although all the text is underlined from the conditional formatting.
In cell A5 I set the second and third characters to red text using the macro
Sub RedNext()
ActiveCell.Characters(2, 2).Font.Color = vbRed
End Sub
Now, the characters whose colour was set with the macro remain red when conditional formatting is triggered, the same as when I change the text colour manually.
Cell A6 shows the result of conditional formatting without having applied a different colour to any text.
I think A3 and A4 should look the same and changing the text colour manually or using VBA shouldn't make a difference. I have tried different approaches for changing the text colour of the first n characters with VBA but always get the same (odd) result.
Is there a way to set the colour of the first n characters with VBA without getting the odd conditional formatting result? Or is this really how it should work? To me it looks like a program bug that needs to be fixed.
I have used one formula to change the font colour if a cell contains the text "complete" & another formula to add a light blue fill to the entire row if the word "odd" appears in a cell which is in a different column to the first formula.
The conditions seem to clash & although I have changed and played with the order of the conditions & checked there is no conflict in the fill/background or the font colour, even when changing the font colour manually again the fill from the second formula returns the font the cell to black although it is set to automatic in the conditional formatting rule with the fill ?
I wonder where i am going wrong as everything suggests the two conditions should work fine together though when the fill is applied the font goes back to black when it should be green ?
Have you any suggestions ?
I found the issue, I needed to press clear on the font section of the formatting on the fill condition and then clear on the fill. Basically as a rule I press clear on anything not required in that condition and this seems to avoid the conflict and run upto 6 rules on the same cell with no problems!
You can combine multiple conditional formats overlapping cells/rows. (Excel's just a little picky that you do it just right!)
Always use New Rule as opposed to using the built-in rules.
Choose Use a formula to determine which cells to format.
For your example question, I populated the cells as shown above. Select cell B4 and set the conditional formatting as above =($B4="complete") . Note that I removed a $ (dynamic vs absolute cell reference) that was automatically filled in, so that I can fill the formatting's formula down.
Highlight entire Row 4 and set the conditional formatting as below. Again, note the modified $.
When it's working properly, copy entire Row 4, select the rows to which the formatting should be applied, and Paste Formatting.
[
Obviously the steps will vary for you depending on your data and what's in the neighboring cells whose formats you may or may not want affected by the formatting and copy/pasting.
Let me know if that works for you.
From my experience with conditional formatting, I believe that it applies a format to the entire cell rather than individually modifying fill or font colour, so formats will not combine. I had a similar situation and solved it by creating an additional rule. In your case, one that applies your desired font colour and background fill to the 'complete' cell if the same row also contains 'odd' using the AND() function.
I'm currently working in excel, and I'm trying to figure out a way to find if multiple cells contain the string value of another cell, and if it does highlight the cell where the row and column meet up. I created an example of what I want, only it will be on a much larger scale.
I've tried using: =ISNUMBER(SEARCH(substring,text)) but I'm not quite sure how to use it the way I want to.
Any help will be appreciated!
Your approach is correct, we can use the fact that conditional formatting is applied like dragging a formula, adapting relative references.
Create a conditional formatting formula rule:
=ISNUMBER(SEARCH(B$1,$A2))
Applied to B2:D7
Your formula will work nicely; what you'll want to do is put that formula into all the cells you want to highlight, so you get FALSE and TRUE in every cell.
You'll then use two Conditional Formatting rules. The first will look for Cell Value = TRUE, and will set cell background and font colour to yellow. The second will look for Cell Value = FALSE, and will set cell background to No Colour and Font to White.
This will reproduce the result you're looking for.
Edited to add:
It is possible to do this using just Conditional Formatting too, but it's a little more fiddly. If you want to try it, you can do this:
Highlight your range, and take note of which cell is Active - that's the cell within your highlighted range that is still white. It's also the one whose address is shown in the Name box in the upper left. For the sake of this answer, we'll assume that's B2
Create a new Conditional Formatting rule. Choose "Use a formula to determine which cells to format".
Use the formula =ISNUMBER(SEARCH(B$1,$A2). Set the format to colour just the cell background.
Note where the $ appears in the formula above - you want to leave the row number anchored in the first part, and the column letter anchored in the second part.
This takes advantage of the fact that Conditional Formatting is able to use absolute, relative, and mixed references to find which cells to format. It's also a tidier solution, but it can be harder to maintain if the sheet is ever repurposed or modified.
I have a condition set up =IF(C2<42,C4="") the background color will turn red if met.
When dragging the crosshair (at the bottom left of the cell) to neighbouring cells, the formula stays the same.
I need the formula to then change to =IF(D2<42,D4="") and so on 300+ times, Is there any way to refer to the current column i.e =IF(thiscolumn-row2 < 42, thiscolum-row4 = "")
Excel sometimes by default puts dollar signs in front of the cell/row labels
(ie $C$4 instead of C4 .... the dollar signs tell excel not to change the formula with each row but to lock in the original values. Does your rule in conditional formatting show dollar signs? That may be your problem. Get rid of the dollar signs and what you need should work.
You don't use If in Conditional Formatting formulas. The formula itself defines the condition that you are looking for, so the if is already implied. So your formula should simply be something like:
=C2<42
I'm confused about the 2nd part of your formula, C4="". Is that supposed to be a 2nd condition? If so, use an AND statement:
=AND(C2<42,C4="")
If you are using Excel 2007 or 2010 another source of potential confusion is that references don't change in the Conditional Formatting formula box when you drag them around, even if they are relative.
Assuming you want to apply formatting to the range c1:d300, select that range of cells, bring up the conditional formatting box and enter:
=AND(C2<42,C4="")
Now it will apply the formatting with relative references to the full selected range.
Is there any way to change the color and/or font of specific text within an excel cell? That is, I'd like one part of the cell's displayed value to be red and another part of the same cell's displayed value to be blue (as an example). Since the displayed values are being calculated as formulas, I'd need some sort of formatting formula that would apply only the stuff inside the formula. I can't seem to find anything in the text.
If you want to do this based on a formula, you will have to write some VBA. See this example
No problem. Edit the value in the formula toolbar.
Take a look at Conditional Formatting in excel.