I can think of no way to do what you want without a subroutine.

Conditional formatting cannot change the Font. It can only color the
entire cell, not a part of it.

You can color and change the font of a fixed Text string, but you loose that
ability in any formula.
For instance you can enter into a cell "RedBlue" . Select the Red, Font
color Red. Select the "Blue", Font color Blue. You will get a two-tone
entry into the cell.
Chance the entry to ="RedBlue" and you cannot select the Blue and color it
different from the Red.

If the requirement is essential, then you will have to create a subroutine
that will enter into the cell a value as a fixed text string. Then use the
Range.Characters collection.

With rngCell.Characters(Start:=intStart, Length:=intLen).Font
.Name = "Arial"
.FontStyle = "Regular"
.Size = 10
.Strikethrough = False
.Superscript = False
.Subscript = False
.OutlineFont = False
.Shadow = False
.Underline = xlUnderlineStyleNone
.ColorIndex = 55
Endwith

Good luck. I hope you get a more helpful answer.

Stephen Rasey
Houston
http://wiserways.com
http://excelsig.org


"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.