XL97: Conditional Formats May Not Work on Rich Text Cells

• Microsoft Excel 97 for Windows

SYMPTOMS

If you apply a Conditional Number format to a cell, the formatting that you specified may not be applied to the entire cell contents when the condition for that format is met in the cell.

CAUSE

The formatting that you specified for a Conditional Number format may not be applied to the entire cell contents if the cell contains Rich Text formatting.

RESOLUTION

If you want the formatting that you specified for a Conditional Number format to be applied to the entire cell contents, remove any Rich Text formatting in the cell.

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in the Microsoft products listed at the beginning of this article. We are researching this problem and will post new information here in the Microsoft Knowledge Base as it becomes available.

MORE INFORMATION

The following steps demonstrate the issue described in the "Symptoms" section:

1. Open a new worksheet and enter the following in Sheet1:

   A1: this is rich-text

2. Double-click cell A1 to activate in-cell editing.

3. Highlight just the "rich-text" portion of cell A1, and then click Cells on the Format menu.

4. In the Format Cells dialog box, click Bold in the Font Style list, and then click OK.

5. Press ENTER. Note that the "rich-text" portion of cell A1 is bold.

6. Select cell A1, and then click Conditional Formatting on the Format menu.

7. In the Conditional Formatting dialog box, set the first drop-down box to "Cell Value Is," set the second drop-down box to "equal to," and then type "this is rich-text" (without the quotation marks) in the RefEdit box to the right of the second drop-down box.

8. Click Format. On the Font tab in the Format Cells dialog box, click a Red color in the Color drop-down box, and then click OK.

   This will set the Conditional Formatting for the cell so that when cell A1 contains the text "this is rich-text" (without the quotation marks), the text in the cell will change to Red.

9. Click OK in the Conditional Formatting dialog box.

REFERENCES

For more information about Conditional Formatting, click the Index tab in Microsoft Excel Help, type the following text

   Conditional formats