Here is an untested idea:

in a cell put in a function like

=Count(A2,B9,C4,F6)

where the cells are the ones containing your RTD functions. This should
generate a calculate when the cells are updated (untested, I don't have
xl2002 or later installed).

then use the calculate event to update your alert cells.

Conditional formatting will not do the rich text formatting you describe.
Additionally, from what I read, RTD doesn't generate a calculate event on
its own change and conditional formatting is updated on a calculation.

--
Regards,
Tom Ogilvy

"Hercules" wrote in message
om...
Hopefully someone can point me in the right direction here. I have a
spreadsheet with RTD functions that are continuously retrieving real
time data.

What I need to do is look at the values in the RTD columns and display
certain special characters in other columns. Specifically, in any
given cell, I would need to display a string of text consisting of 3
different fonts and 3 different colors.

Conditional formatting only seems to work at the cell level and not
the character level so I can't use it. That leaves me with using the
Worksheet_Change event. I've written the VBA code to create the
special character string but the problem is that when the RTD values
change, the Worksheet_Change event never fires.

Does anyone know how to detect when the value returned by an RTD
function changes? Alternatively, does anyone know how I can use
conditional formatting to accomplish this?

Thanks for your help.