placeholder text

The only reason it would not show you the text you have written is because the contents of A3 is a space " " and is not BLANK. highlight A3 hit DELETE on the Keyboard and watch your text appear

Also should point out or ask the intent of the A2 field...

If I entered Orange Tigers as the group name... would you want that to repeat into A2? Because your false dictates that A2 = A3 when it is not blank... where I think you would be better off setting it to BLANK since you do not always want it to display the text Enter Group Name
Change the A3 reference to "" if you want it to vanish upon entry of a group name
=IF(ISBLANK(A3), "Enter Group Name", A3)
=IF(ISBLANK(A3), "Enter Group Name", "")

Without VB... I think the best "Hack" to do here would be to insert a column Left of A, make the width of that column .5 or less and input what you want to see in that field.

The overflow will look like the text is in the adjacent cell and when something is actually entered into the cell it will be constrained to the A column where it actually lives until that cell is cleared again...


You could also add a NOTE and make it always visible... but that becomes an obnoxious floating item...

Would it be bad to actually write in Enter Group Name and conditionally format that to be GREY text when it is exactly that phrase, then when they type over it it will be gone and full color?


really depends on the use of the file and what the full setup is ... tough to say what I would do specifically without seeing it in full and understanding who is utilizing the documents.

I cannot think of a way to display it in the cell elsewise