I am putting together a calendar that tracks vacation, sick, holiday and
personal time used.

I created a drop down menu in one cell with those four option. In the
adjacent cell, I am putting options for hours: 8, 12, or 16 hours as another
drop down menu.

I am color coding the type of days requested for visual simplicity (vacation
= blue, sick = green, etc).

My question is two-fold:
1) how can I I get the color from the "day" cell on the left extend to the
"hours" cell on the right, once it is chosen?

2) How would I link the two cells so that I could get a monthly sum of the
hours of each type:
i.e.- when you choose "vacation" from the left drop-down menu, the
"vacation" function would then include the hours in the cell adjacent in the
sum function.
If you had chosen "sick" instead of "vacation", a different function would
record that value for the associated hours.
This way, you can sum up the four different types of days off requested in
separate furmulas.

So the type of day chosen in the drop down menu defines which function
calculates the hours value in the adjacent cell.

Thanks.