Conditional Formatting 'Stop if True' not working for me...

[d0rian]

Feel like I'm going batty / missing something obvious. Read a cool trick to be able to toggle Conditional Formatting ("CF") on/off to see if that might be what's bogging down my file speed: simply create a new rule and move it to the TOP of all the rest of your CF rules, and click the "Stop if True" checkbox -- can make it even simpler by toggling the CF reference cell with a checkbox like I did below, where I have the checkbox toggling the value of B53 between TRUE/FALSE).

But it's not working for me: regardless of whether B53 = TRUE/FALSE, all of the rest of my CF rules continue to be active, even though I've moved the toggle rule to the top of my CF rule order. Help anyone?

(EDIT: the only thing I could think of was whether the 'toggle' CF rule might only STOP other CF rules in the range of cells that the toggle rule applies to (in my case, only cell B53)...but that doesn't seem to make sense -- I thought that it would act as a master 'toggle-off' rule that would disable EVERY rule in the sheet beneath it...)

 

[d0rian]

After quick trial/error, it seems like the thing in italics/underline in my OP is, in fact, how it works...which strikes me as rather misleading (at least as far as how the features are described in the excel dialog boxes...in the pic in my OP, a common-sense reading of what you see in the window would seem to be "If this top rule is True, then ignore any and every rule below it in the hierarchy, regardless of what the rule is, or what range it applies to."

Whereas, what's actually going in, it seems, is more like "If this rule is TRUE, then change the "Applies to" range of any rule beneath it to exclude the range that this rule applies to...so in this case, don't apply any CF'ing to cell B53 if the top rule is True, but go ahead and apply all other CF formatting to other cells."

TLDR: looks like in order to achieve what I want, I need to make a rule that applies to my entire sheet (or at least all cells that are covered by other CF rules), and simply choose 'No Formatting"; something like this seems to work:

 

[d0rian]

Last comment for now; while I seem to have "figured out" how to get the behavior I want, as I think about it more, it kinda begs the question of whether this "CF-rule Toggle" will actually achieve my main objective: which is to toggle CF off in order to see whether my 100+ CF rules are what's bogging down my sheet.

Because if the CF logic was as I laid out in my OP, would mean that Excel, once it ran across a "Stop if True" rule, could happily disregard any and all CF rules beneath it without even looking at them, considering what range they applied to, or evaluating if they were true or not.

But it's not quite that simple: rather, Excel DOES apparently need to look at the CF rules beneath the "Stop if True" rule, because as described in my 2nd post above, the CF logic only turns off CF for cells that are part of the 'Stop if True' rule's "Applies to" range. So it's not as simple as a 'blanket disregard all CF rules below" functionality...it still needs to compare the ranges of all CF rules in my sheet...which begs the question of whether it's also evaluating the rules associated with all of those lower CF rules as well (in which case, this master CF-toggle switch won't actually allow me to see whether my sheet runs faster without CF at all.)