Conditional formatting with dates and text names

[Melchisedek]

Hi all, newcomer but really happy to be here! Kindly excuse any noob-ishness...

I'm having a problem with conditional formatting that seems to be going on for almost 2 days now. I have been setting up a project planner tool based on a template I found online that produces colored timebars based on date values using this formula:

=IF($G13>$F13;AND(R$11>=$E13;R$11<=$J13-$P13);AND(R$11>=$E13;R$11<=$I13-$O13))

It works for intended purposes but I have received a recommendation to have it change color depending on the person's name (reference text in another cell, in a different column/row). Naturally I started with creating duplicates of this formula for the different persons and giving it different color which only works if changing order of them in the CF menu. I tried to add another if argument but it didn't work and a while looking around for an answer I was told that in CF direct references aren't allowed, but only indirect function. I tried to combine it but to no avail again.

I then thought of using a helper column and have it retrieve row by row the same name which would be blanked-out, kinda to remain hidden, but I can't see there either a way of circumventing that conundrum of the CF formula.

I feel like I'm missing something fairly obvious but I have had no luck and not even my internet searches revealed anything of use. It's probably down to being a pretty basic excel user, so any help would be appreciated.

 

[Joe4]

Welcome to the Board!

How do you determine which color each user should be? Is there some key or something?
Quite honestly, from what I can gather, it sounds like this might be more of a VBA thing than a Conditional Formatting thing, unless you want to set up separate CF formulas for each person.