Conditional formatting based on what another cell contains

[LadyHarper]

I feel so stupid asking this... but for the life of me the answer is not coming

If Cell A4 Contains "Uplift" turn cell B4 Orange

 

[Joe4]

You write the Conditional Formatting rule for cell B4, and use the "Use a formula to determine which cells to format" option and use the formula:

=ISNUMBER(SEARCH("Uplift",A4))

Note that the Search function is NOT case-sensitive. So it will find "UPLIFT", "Uplift", "uplift", etc.
If you only want to find it is EXACTLY "Uplift", use the FIND function instead of the SEARCH function, i.e.

=ISNUMBER(FIND("Uplift",A4))

 

[LadyHarper]

You write the Conditional Formatting rule for cell B4, and use the "Use a formula to determine which cells to format" option and use the formula:

=ISNUMBER(SEARCH("Uplift",A4))

I swear I tried this and it didn't work. Thank you

 

[Joe4]

You are welcome. Glad I was able to help.

Note the update I made to my previous reply, mentioning the difference between SEARCH and FIND.

 

[DaveB673]

You are welcome. Glad I was able to help.

Note the update I made to my previous reply, mentioning the difference between SEARCH and FIND.

Thank you for explaining the difference, as I did not know. When you make a conditional formatting rule, does it write something in VBA?

Also, what exactly does the ISNUMBER function do? I have not used that previously. Thanks.

 

[Joe4]

Thank you for explaining the difference, as I did not know. When you make a conditional formatting rule, does it write something in VBA?

No, Conditional Formatting does not write to VBA. It has nothing to do with VBA, it is a built-in Excel feature, like sorting, formatting, etc.
Note that you can write VBA code that creates Conditional Formatting rules.

Also, what exactly does the ISNUMBER function do? I have not used that previously. Thanks.

As you might have guessed, it checks to see whether a cell contains a valid number (like all the "IS" functions, it returns a boolean value of TRUE or FALSE).
Note that it not only checks to see if the number is numeric, but also that is was added as number.
If you enter a number as text, it will return FALSE (i.e. if you type a single quote mark before your entry, it will enter it as text).

Note that most valid-entered numbers are right-justified, while most text entries are left-justified (unless you manually change the justification).

Also note that Microsoft/Excel has pretty good documentation on all their functions.
You can find it with a simple Google Search (i.e. "Excel ISNUMBER function").

IS functions - Microsoft Support

Use IS functions like ISERROR or ISERR to see if an error condition exists, ISBLANK to check if cells are empty, or ISNUMBER to check if values are numbers.

support.microsoft.com