Conditional Formatting Letter Grades - "Minuses" Not Working

[diderooy]

Hello,

I'm sure it's out there somewhere but I haven't been able to find it yet. So sorry, everyone, I'm pulling you into this.

I have created a worksheet of letter grades and would like to do a conditional format color fill of the cells for every letter grade in the same cell. These grades include pluses and minuses. I have all the rules generated as "Format only cells that contain" "Specific Text" "containing" "A+" as an example; "A" or "A-" would be the others for that letter, there are no quotation marks, spaces or other characters in that field of the rule. All of them seem to work correctly except for the minuses, which seem to filling with the A/B/C/D (no pluses or minuses). I have listed my RGB color fills below:

F 255, 209, 209
D- 255, 220, 194
D 255, 230, 179
D+ 255, 238, 189
C- 255, 247, 199
C 255, 255, 209
C+ 247, 255, 200
B- 239, 255, 191
B 231, 255, 183
B+ 222, 255, 190
A- 213, 255, 197
A 204, 255, 204
A+ 198, 255, 215

So the A- grades fill with the same color as the A grades, the B- grades are the same color as the B grades, etc. But the "plus" grades are distinct in color from the others of their letter.

What am I doing wrong?

EDIT: All the letter grade cells are formatted as "General" type, which I didn't think would matter but I don't know.

 

[Fluff]

Make sure that the rule for A- & A+ are above the rule for A the same for the other letters.
Alternatively change the rules to use

 

[R2ah1ze1l]

It appears after some testing this is order related:
+/-
+/-
Letter only

Hope that helps you, just arrange your solid letter rules to the bottom of your list.

 

[diderooy]

Make sure that the rule for A- & A+ are above the rule for A the same for the other letters.
Alternatively change the rules to use

It looks like this solved my problem on its own! What does changing the rule type affect (like your screenshot) do?

Thanks very much for your help! I didn't realize (or forgot) that ordering the rules might actually impact the way they're applied...I had just been thinking they were arrangeable for comparison's sake.

A belated Happy New Year

 

[Fluff]

Because you are using "Contains" it will look to highlight A, A+ & A- because they all contain A, so the the order of the rules matters.
However if you use Equals, the order of the rules won't matter as A does not equal A- or A+

 

[diderooy]

That makes sense--I will take care of that too!

Thanks again

 

[Fluff]

Glad we could help & thanks for the feedback.

 

[R2ah1ze1l]

That makes sense--I will take care of that too!

Thanks again

Don't forget to mark your solution to help others...