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Conditionally formating a range of cells based on a formula

  1. #1
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    Conditionally formating a range of cells based on a formula

    Hi all,

    I had a problem yesterday which I couldn't solve. I had a list of people on sheet1 of my workbook, and on sheet 2 a table with a list of names and their department.

    I started off by wanting to use VLOOKUP within the conditional formatting feature of Excel to find anyone who worked in "finance" in sheet 2. I could get this formula to work on the sheet but as soon as I put it into the conditional format feature it wouldn't work.

    Trying to find a work around I added a column in sheet 1 where I inputted the VLOOKUP formula and caused it to display "1" if the person worked in finance. It looked like this:

    A: Person's name
    B: Value of 1 or 0

    The idea was to hide column B and use conditional formatting to say "if column B2 = 1 colour column A2 blue". Now I could get this to work on a single row but couldn't make it work over a range, ie. "if cells A2:A150 have a 1 in the column next to them colour the relevent cell blue"

    I feel I'm missing the obvious. I found quite a few answers online but non actually specified how to get the conditional formatting to recognise the relevent cell it should be looking at in a range.

    Could someone please tell me:
    1) How would I get conditional formatting working over a range
    2) Whether it is possible to use VLOOKUP within the conditional formatting function of Excel.

    Thanks so much for your help!

  2. #2
    Forum Expert Fotis1991's Avatar
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    Re: Conditionally formating a range of cells based on a formula

    You need to use named ranges for conditional formatting from other sheet.

    See the example.
    Attached Files Attached Files
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    Fotis.

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  3. #3
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    Re: Conditionally formating a range of cells based on a formula

    Aha thanks so much Fotis! I didn't even know you could name ranges in Excel (I'm new...) but that makes complete sense. You've saved me loads of time.

  4. #4
    Forum Expert Fotis1991's Avatar
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    Re: Conditionally formating a range of cells based on a formula

    You are welcome!

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