Conditional Formatting help required

D

Dale Fye

I am trying to format the background color of a cell based on text in that
cell.

If the cell contains "EXCELLENT", I want to color the background green
(works great).

If the cell contains "PARTIAL", "GOOD", or "MEDIUM", I want to color it
yellow. I've tried putting the following in a Cell, but it just returns a
#Value error.

=OR(SEARCH("MEDIUM", D4)> 0, SEARCH("PARTIAL",D4)>0,Search("GOOD", D4)>0)

When I only put one of these critiera in the OR function, it returns the
proper logical value. Any ideas what I am doing wrong?

Actually, I tested =SEARCH("GOOD", D4) and =Search("PARTIAL", D4)
individually as the cell forumla and they each returned a #Value! result.

Any ideas how to make this work?
 
D

Dale Fye

OK, so I figured out that the Search( ) function returns #Value! if it
doesn't find a the search string in the string to be searched (why can't it
return a zero like the INSTR function in ACCESS? Thank you Microsoft!)

So how do I work around this problem?
 
T

T. Valko

If the cell contains "PARTIAL", "GOOD", or "MEDIUM",

Are those words a *substring* or are they the only string?

If they're the only string:

=OR(D4="PARTIAL",D4="GOOD",D4="MEDIUM")

If those words are a *substring*:

=OR(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("partial",D4)),ISNUMBER(SEARCH(F2,"good")),ISNUMBER(SEARCH(F3,"medium")))

Biff
 
T

T. Valko

=OR(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("partial",D4)),ISNUMBER(SEARCH(F2,"good")),ISNUMBER(SEARCH(F3,"medium")))

Ooops!

The cell references should all be D4.

Biff

T. Valko said:
If the cell contains "PARTIAL", "GOOD", or "MEDIUM",
Click to expand...

Are those words a *substring* or are they the only string?

If they're the only string:

=OR(D4="PARTIAL",D4="GOOD",D4="MEDIUM")

If those words are a *substring*:

=OR(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("partial",D4)),ISNUMBER(SEARCH(F2,"good")),ISNUMBER(SEARCH(F3,"medium")))

Biff
Click to expand...
 
D

Dale Fye

Thanks, Biff.

Substring (could be several differnet values). Isn't it a pitty we cannot
standardize functions across VBA so that INSTR( ) from Access would work in
Excel?

I'll give that a try.
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T. Valko said:
If the cell contains "PARTIAL", "GOOD", or "MEDIUM",
Click to expand...

Are those words a *substring* or are they the only string?

If they're the only string:

=OR(D4="PARTIAL",D4="GOOD",D4="MEDIUM")

If those words are a *substring*:

=OR(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("partial",D4)),ISNUMBER(SEARCH(F2,"good")),ISNUMBER(SEARCH(F3,"medium")))

Biff
Click to expand...
 
T

T. Valko

If you have a whole bunch of words to check it would probably be easier to
list those words in a range of cells then use this more compact formula:

G1:G10 = list of words

=OR(ISNUMBER(SEARCH(G1:G10,D4)))

Biff

Dale Fye said:
Thanks, Biff.

Substring (could be several differnet values). Isn't it a pitty we cannot
standardize functions across VBA so that INSTR( ) from Access would work
in
Excel?

I'll give that a try.
Click to expand...
 
P

Pete_UK

You could define your own function to make use of INSTR in VBA -
however, a UDF is likely to take longer to evaluate a result than
using worksheet functions directly (depending on how complex they
are).

Pete
 
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