Conditional formatting a MID formula

[Cliffork]

Hello,

I have the range shown below on a worksheet I fill in for individual instruments I am calibrating. The far right cell pulls data directly from a device, and all the cells left of it use MID functions to pull the reading from the individual sensors. I need to make a conditional formatting formula for the CO and H2S cts to be green if the value is between 32700-32800 and red otherwise. Obviously this is a very simple set of formulas to make normally, but because it's using a MID function it doesn't seem to want to perform any conditional formatting on them. Any suggestions for what I'm doing wrong here?

New HCH Compilation File.xlsm
	A	B	C						I	J	K	L	M	N	O
34									CH4 %	CO2 %	O2 Counts	CO cts	H2S cts	H2 cts
36	99.99 N2 Reading								0.00	0.00	0021	32458	32740	08322926	08242 M + C - 04324 02447 05887 02456 02423 01349 03494 04034 06978 00000 08172 03196 00021 0.00 0.00 32458 32740 08322926
Initial Cal

Cell Formulas
Range	Formula
I36	I36	=MID(O36,98,5)
J36	J36	=MID(O36,107,5)
K36	K36	=MID(O36,93,4)
L36	L36	=MID(O36,116,5)
M36	M36	=MID(O36,122,5)
N36	N36	=MID(O36,128,8)

Cells with Conditional Formatting
Cell	Condition		Cell Format	Stop If True
L36:M36	Cell Value	between 32700 and 32800	text	NO
L36:M36	Cell	contains a blank value	text	NO
L36:M36	Cell Value	<32700	text	NO
L36:M36	Cell Value	>32800	text	NO

 

[Asbestos_Jen]

I think the MID (and Left and Right) functions output as text values. Try:

=--MID(O36,98,5)

 

[Cliffork]

I think the MID (and Left and Right) functions output as text values. Try:

=--MID(O36,98,5)

Looks like that works! What does the -- do? Change the formatting output to numbers?

 

[Joe4]

Looks like that works! What does the -- do? Change the formatting output to numbers?

Yep, exactly. MID is a text function that returns a text result.
The "--" coerces the text to a number. You could just as easily multiply by 1 or add 0 to coerce it to a number.