Conditional Formatting based on VLOOKUP - Issue with Blanks

Hi,

I have an issue with conditional formatting based on a vlookup and not equal to. It works fine until the cell in which the conditional formatting is applied is blank and the cell that is being vlookup'd is also blank. In these instances, the conditional formatting is highlighting these as being not equal to each other also. However, if I double-click on the cells with conditional formatting applied as though I was going to enter text but then press return without entering anything the conditional formatting corrects it self and no longer highlights the cell.

Hopefully the above makes sense and someone can help.

Cheers,
Hozcat

Point taken Glenn. Now with attachment - Thanks.

Table 1 has conditional formatting applied based on the values not being equal to the values in Table 2 (based on VLOOKUP). As can be seen, cells C4, D4 & E4 have the correct formatting applied but cells D3 & E3 are flagging as not being equal to also but the values match (both cells are blank)

Cheers,
Hozcat

Thanks. What I am trying to achieve is to flag differences between the two tables that have the same column headers, however, in the raw data Table1 could have 100 rows whereas Table2 could have 1000, which is why I was trying to use the vlookup function.

Using the =AND(NOT(ISBLANK(J3)),A3=J3) to flag the inverse does not highlight that cells D3 & E3 match the values in M3 & N3 so even if the table sizes were the same in the raw data this wouldn't highlight all of the differences.

Cheers,
Hozcat

I think the issue with the blanks is related to the format of the data being different in Tables 1 & 2 (but I can't work out what). If I paste special the values from cells D3 & E3 into M3 & N3, the conditional formatting corrects itself to show what I was expecting to see.

Cheers,
Hozcat

Have sussed this. For anybody that runs into similar problems in the future, the issue is being caused because I have used the TRIM function on the data in Table1 but not in Table2....

Cheers