Cell Background Colour?

1. I want to change the colour of a cell if another cell contains any text.
For example, if cell A1 is empty then cell A2 will be standard white colour. If cell A1 contains any text (any word/letter/number), then cell A2 will change to a specific background colour.
Can this be done using conditional formatting or function formulas, as I want more than one cell to change colour and have different border types.

What I want is to create a new row (with different colour, borders, formulas and conditional formatting) for a database once a certain field is filled in.



2. Using "#,##0;[Red]-#,##0" to custom format cells, how do change the colour of the cell background rather than the text colour.

Any help is appreciated, thanks.

thanks for the info, that has set me up good now.

Can I copy the conditional format of cells that use CF into another cell; as with data validation using normal copy and paste. Or is there another way.

thanks.