Thread: Conditionally format a cell to have the fill color of a different cell

I have a spread sheet and I want to conditionally format rows to be a certain color. That part I'm fine with. But I don't want them to be a set color. I have a "key" of different colored cells that I want to be the fill colors of the formatting. The ultimate goal is that for example the key looked like this

red
blue
yellow
green

then the rows I had would be formatted as red, blue, yellow, and green. But if you were to go into the key and change the first cell from red to purple, then the rows would become formatted as purple, blue, yellow, and green. Obviously I can copy formating by hand using the format painter, but I want it to update automatically. Is this possible? Thank you for your help.

Hey gryffin13;

Personally, I'm not sure about using conditional formatting based on the color of a given cell, but I have a quick, easy workaround for you.

Since you're familiar with the setup of conditional formatting for a given row based upon the value of a single cell within that row, you could include an additional column in the worksheet with for the color designation. Point the conditional formatting to the color designation column entry, and then when you're done, just hide that column.

I'm not quite clear what you mean by the color designation column. Perhaps I am not as familiar with conditional formatting as I thought. What I have been doing is just highlighting my row, going to conditional format and selecting fill in non-blanks. Then selecting my color. But there is no way to choose anything other than just a predefined color. I understand how I could choose to highlight my row IF there was a certain value in a different cell, but I don't know how that would help me. Also I need to make it so I only highlight non-blanks, highlighting everything will not cut it for me. Thank you for responding so quickly