What can be done with highlighted cells?

[jimplace]

When I sort a list of product numbers appearing on invoices I identify a
certain product number by highlighting the cell in yellow. My task if
to find all invoices where the identified product number appears and
all product numbers appearing on those invoices. Currently I sort the
list by invoice number and manually identify the invoices that contain
highlighted product numbers. Do the highlighted cells have a special
value that would allow me to identify all product numbers appearing
only on the invoices that have a highlighted cell?

 

[JLatham]

Pretty much nothing unless you use some VBA coding to reference the color
codes. Highlighting seems to have been incorporated merely as a convenience
to us humans to quickly see some items, but has little use for doing much of
anything at the worksheet level. By that, I mean there aren't any worksheet
functions that use the cell shading to determine anything.

If you are doing shading by way of conditional formatting, then I would
consider adding another helper column or cell that uses basically the same
logic you use to obtain the shading to come up with a kind of a category or
stock code. You could then use the content/value of that column/cell to
group and identify similar items (which would presumably also be shaded the
same).

But I get the impression that your invoices would be on separate sheets,
with the product numbers in one area of those sheets. And if that's the case
then the helper column suggestion doesn't do you much good - it's kind of
targeted at helping with long lists on a single sheet. And if this is the
case, then once again, you're looking at a little VBA code to identify
invoice sheets with specific product codes in certain areas and somehow
grouping those together or giving you a list of them.