Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Excel 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Excel, click here: Conditionally Highlighting Cells Containing Formulas.
Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated November 9, 2024)
This tip applies to Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003
You probably already know that you can select all the cells containing formulas in a worksheet by pressing F5 and choosing Special | Formulas. If you need to keep a constant eye on where formulas are located, then repeatedly doing the selecting can get tedious. A better solution is to use the conditional formatting capabilities of Excel to highlight cells with formulas.
Before you can use conditional formatting, however, you need to create a user-defined function that will return True or False, depending on whether there is a formula in a cell. The following macro will do the task very nicely:
Function HasFormula(rCell As Range) As Boolean Application.Volatile HasFormula = rCell.HasFormula End Function
To use this with conditional formatting, select the cells you want checked, and then follow these steps:
Figure 1. The Conditional Formatting dialog box.
Figure 2. The Format Cells dialog box.
Note:
ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (3188) applies to Microsoft Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Excel (Excel 2007 and later) here: Conditionally Highlighting Cells Containing Formulas.
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