How to conditionally format cells that look empty but are not actually empty?

[alchavar]

Hi there!

First of all, thanks for reading my post.
Second of all, please consider that this post should've been named as: How to conditionally format cells that DON'T look empty. I realized about the mistake once I have submitted my post, so I cannot correct it now.

Here's my situation:

I have this formula on cell A1 on Sheet2:

=IF(Sheet1!A1="","",Sheet1!A1)

Then I drag the formula to the cells below on column A on Sheet2.
How can I set up a formula on the conditional formatting feature so as to highlight (say, for instance, color in yellow) ONLY those cells that DON'T look empty. If you take a look at my formula, chances are it will return nothing on some cells, depending on content from Sheet1. Yet, those cells wouldn't be empty; they still have content (a formula, on this case), so I can't use the condition =A1<>"" on the conditional formatting feature, because cells that appear as "empty" are not actually empty; so, eventually, all will be highlighted.

[dredwolf]

you could try something like this for your conditional formatting formula :

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this will return true as long as the cell is not actually empty (if it has a space, a number, a formula etc., it returns true)

Hope this helps

[alchavar]

hi dredwolf!

It didn-t work, but you gave a clue on how to do it.
So I tried =CELL("contents",A1)<>"" and it worked perfectly!!!
Thanks for the hint!

[dredwolf]

Hmm not sure why it didn't work the first way, worked on my test data..
But I am glad that you could take it and make it work for you!
Congrats