I have been doing a lot of research regarding this but it seems my formula is not working. I was trying to check two cells. One cell should not be empty and another cell should be less than or equal zero and what it does is it changes the color of the text of a certain cell.
Please see picture below for reference.
I have an existing conditional formatting which checks D5:D29 if it's not empty and changes the color of E5:E31 to Blue. See formula : =NOT(ISBLANK(D5:D29)) - this is working great.
Problem:
I'm going to check cell D5:D29 if it's not empty and I'm going to check E5:E31 if it's less than or equal to zero. If both are TRUE, the color of the text in E5:E31 changes to red. Formula : =AND(NOT(ISBLANK(D5:D29)),(E5:E31<=0))
Please see picture below. My formula is not working. Is there something wrong in it?
Short answer
The problem is on the references being used.
Instead of D5:D29 and E5:E31 use D5 and E5 when to the conditional formatting formula applied to E5:31
Explanation
Conditional formatting formulas applied to a range of cells, should be written having in mind the top-left cell. The spreadsheet engine will "automatically adjust" the formula for the other cells in the range.
Related
We track workshop registrations in a google sheet and I'm trying to conditionally format a range of cells (A7:P14) based on the text in cell E7 (Eng DLO, Eng TBC, Sp DLO, Sp TBC).
I used the formula
=COUNTIF($E7:$E, "Eng DLO")
and A7:S14 turned the selected color (light purple). When I then added conditional formatting to turn dark purple with the formula
=COUNTIF($E7:$E, "Eng TBC")
the color wouldn't change when I changed the value in E7 from Eng DLO to Eng TBC.
I know the issue is that I need it to EXACTLY MATCH the text and I tried incorporating EXACT into the COUNTIF formula, but it would only highlight E7 or just A7:P7 instead of the whole selected range in the conditional format (A7:P14).
Here is a sample sheet with what I am hoping it will eventually look like once I get the conditional formatting to actually work (I removed the conditional formatting). https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Bn9FVTHE1OO49p4PKo6j0Qd3c0NX6pUq3vp0pHFNGVI/edit?usp=sharing
Got a couple other issues here:
The 7 is a floating reference, so you need to fix it with $. This is the reason your formula isn't working. In the next row, it would start counting in cell E8. With the $, it works, but less efficiently than it could, which brings me to point 2.
If you're only referencing one cell, just check for equality against that one cell.
To the Eng TBC, you would use
=EXACT($E$7, "Eng TBC")
Just to demonstrate a point, without the dollar sign, the next rows cells would have been checking against this:
=EXACT($E8, "Eng TBC")
Which of course would have been empty.
A More Flexible Solution
Since you probably don't want to keep having to reformat per set of cells, you can use a ROW-based approach to tackle the issue. This one, for example, assumes 8 seats per group.
=EXACT("Eng DLO",INDIRECT("E"&(8 * INT((ROW() - 7) / 8) + 7)))
Every 8 rows, it references the next multiple of 7. (Yes, INT is FLOOR, but shorter.)
I have a spreadsheet with a custom formula that changes the colour of different cells based on the value in the dates column. I also frequently have to change the formula based on different times of the month.
I would like the formula to point to a cell eg A1 so that whenever I change the contents of A1, the custom formula itself will change.
Currently the custom conditional formatting formula is =E2>=TODAY() -21
I alternate between this and =AND(E2>DATE(2019,3,23),E2<DATE(2019,4,20))
I've tried to use =INDIRECT(A1) as the formula, with A1 cell content =E2>=TODAY() -21 but this doesn't work. I would really appreciate any tips on how to get this working.
custom formula:
=IF((($A$1="=E2>=TODAY()-21")*(E2>=TODAY()-21))+
(($A$1="=AND(E2>DATE(2019,3,23),E2<DATE(2019,4,20))")*((E2>DATE(2019,3,23))*(E2<DATE(2019,4,20)))),1)
demo spreadsheet
I am using Google Sheets and trying to write a custom formatting rule that seems like it should be simple. I am trying to figure out how to conditionally format all the cells in a column INCLUDING AND ABOVE (but not below) the cell that meets my condition.
I've found a lot of things that will format the entire column, but that's not what I'm looking for.
The image below is a basic example that I manually colored in to do what I want.
It's for my budget spreadsheet, where each row is an entry from a particular date. I have an "Agreement" column that is empty except when I enter the date that I reconciled the budget. I want it to color that cell and all the empty cells above it green, signifying at a glance: "everything up to this point is ok/has been checked over". Then as time goes by, and I enter another date several rows below, I want it to extend the colored shading up to there.
I've been searching, but it is hard to articulate this; if I say "until this cell" I get results for "shade cell until text is entered"; any mention of "above" and "below" generally relates to the values in the cells; I've found some things about Indirect but just for a single cell above, not for all cells above the current cell.
Wondering if this is even possible...
Google Sheets example
If you create a conditional formatting rule for column A using a Custom Formula you can use this formula:
=COUNTIF(ROW(),"<="&LARGE(ArrayFormula(IF(ISBLANK(A1:A100),"TRUE",ROW(A1:A100))),1))
The larger the ranges you use, the slower it will be however.
I have a sheet where I would like to turn a row a color based on the value of two cells. I already have conditional formatting based on one cell of the cells I want to use for the two cell formatting.
I am using =AND($J:$J="Cancel",$L:$L="Yes") for the two cell formatting but it doesnt seem to work. Not sure if the first one =$J:$J="Cancel" is negating the formatting of the other or if if my formula is just bad.
Any advice would be appreciated.
if the trick is that you want the whole row to be colored that way, then all you need to modify is the "range" to apply it too, so you enter something like the start column and then just give it a row number as the second half of the range, without the column argument: A1:10001
That exact formula you listed =AND($J:$J="Cancel",$L:$L="Yes") worked for me when using the "custom formula" option:
I'm trying to have a cell on Sheet A check if it's either > or < the value in a cell on Sheet B, then change its color accordingly. Under the custom formula I use: =A1>("SheetB!A1"), but it doesn't seem to work. I use the color Green for the > and the color Red for the <. Every time the rules are saved it will always display A1 on Sheet A in red.
Is the function wrong? Or is it not possible to have a Conditional Format even search across sheets?
For some reason (I confess I don't really know why) a custom formula in conditional formatting does not directly support cross-sheet references.
But cross-sheet references are supported INDIRECT-ly:
=A1>INDIRECT("SheetB!A1")
or if you want to compare A1:B10 on SheetA with A1:B10 on SheetB, then use:
=A1>INDIRECT("SheetB!A1:B10")
=A1>INDIRECT("SheetB!"&CELL("address",A1))
applied to range A1:B10.
You can do this by referencing the cell and row number in the current sheet, so as you drag-copy that conditional formatting to other rows it will reference the correct cells.
In the below equation I am coloring cells based on the exact same cell in some other sheet named "otherSheetName" in this example. If for example you want to color cell B2 in Sheet2 if the cell B2 in otherSheetName contains the text "I Like Dogs" you would go to cell Sheet2!B2 , click condition formatting, choose equation from the drop down and paste the below equation.
=IF(INDIRECT("otherSheetName!"&ADDRESS(ROW();COLUMN()))="I Like Dogs";1;0)
Comparing strings instead of numbers for a conditional formatting rule, you can use:
=EXACT(A1,(INDIRECT("Sheet2!A1")))
Case sensitive.
There is one trick/bug: if you have conditional formatting in Sheet1 that explicitly references itself (e.g., the formula is Sheet1!$C$2), you can copy the conditional formatting to Sheet2 with Paste special > conditional formatting and it will "work"... as long as you don't touch anything:
if you try to edit the conditional formatting in Sheet2, then you'll get an "Invalid formula" error.
if columns/rows change in Sheet1 such that they affect the conditional formatting (e.g., row/column inserts), this is not reflected in Sheet2 (keep in mind that the indirect trick mentioned by #AdamL will also not reflect column/row updates either, so it's a wash in this respect).
I was able to compare two sheet and highlight the differences on the second sheet using conditional formatting :
=A1<>(INDIRECT("Sheet1!"&Address(Row(),Column(),)))