Hello, I run a small office football pool, each week is another sheet in the workbook
each game is in their own column, one row for away teams, one row for home teams

Each punter have their own row. Data entered is validated against the two teams playing in that column to assure the only the abbreviations for the teams playing can be entered.

One row also contains the teams that win the game. From that, conditional formatting changes the color of all the teams in all the rows & columns from Black to Green or Red depending on the winning team entered in each column.

This year we moved to the punters entering their own data (with no validation) in a table that has one line for entry imbedded in an email. That allows me to simply copy/paste an entire row of pick data, then perform the manually invoked Excel Data Validation (draw circles around invalid data). Or so I thought...

Unfortunately nothing happens when that data validation function is selected (with all the relevant cells selected). So I ran a test removing the conditional formatting in a series of those cells and Data Validation functioned correctly.

So my question is: Is that a design feature (They are mutually exclusive, i.e., cannot use manually invoked Data Validation - draw a circle - on cells that also have conditional formatting rules)?... or are there any conditional formatting settings that would not overlay the circle drawn by manually invoked Data Validation (draw a circle)?

If it is a design feature, is there a way to create a rule in conditional formatting that would allow it to determine if the data was valid (looking at Excel Data Validation results, thereby allowing me to color the cell differently so I could identify the error? (without just coding new rules that perform the same data validation within Conditional Formatting.

Thank you!