Conditional formatting - Possible to ignore back colour? (Transparency)

Hi,

I have a sheet that presents a lot of data in a horizontal orientation over 100 columns. I added some conditional formatting to colour the background of even rows in the layout a light grey, and another to force the odd rows to be white. This just makes it a lot easier to read than solid blocks of white. I initially coloured them manually, but was continually "fixing" it when people copy/pasted.

I now need to add conditional formatting to add some colour to certain areas that meet or fail targets. I've gone with a fill effect that colours just the centre of the cell as I had complaints that it looked too daunting/messy to have solid blocks of red/green all over the sheet. This way looks a lot nicer, but I have a minor annoyance in that the format over-writes the colour of the overall column. E.G. I have a column coloured light grey, I apply a format that fades red in the centre to white at the edges, the cells where this applies now have a white background with red in the middle and it looks messy.

I know it's probably not possible but... Is there a way to set the fill effect to go from red to transparent thereby not messing with the back colour I already set? Or would I have to make separate rules for odd and even numbered columns?

Regards
Diberlee

Originally Posted by romperstomper

You'd have to use separate rules. Could you use icon sets instead?

Hi,

Thanks for confirming.

I can't use icon sets in this case as most of the conditionals are formula based, I don't think you can use icon sets there? Also because of the number of columns and how much wider that would make things. The sheet shows stats for each day of a week and right now a full day's worth of stuff fits just nicely on a screen/printout.

Regards