I use a spreadsheet to analyse the firewall logs for the month to which is added
100-120 data entries per day. I add the data for the current day and then run a
macro which sorts the data based on IP address.

I read through the spreadsheet looking for multiple entries coming from an IP
address and colour the characters where this occurs red for spam, magenta for
port probes etc and blue for pings.

Once that has been completed I run a second macro, which sorts the data back
into date order, and then save the spreadsheet.

I occurred to me that I could save myself quite a bit of checking time if the
second macro could change the characters to grey in all entries where they have
not already been made red, magenta or blue. The process would check the
current colour and change it to grey if it was black.

Since the characters for all new entries added that day would be black this
would reduce my checking down to around 100-120 each day instead of up to 3,500
or so towards the end of the month.

As the month progresses some of those entries previously made grey may need to
be manually changed to red, magenta or blue if another entry or entries from
that IP address occurs in the new entries added that day.

To complicate matters I have 4,000 rows of helper columns H to N to enable the
initial sort based on IP address. The data added each day only occupies
columns A to G and only characters in these columns should be made grey. So
the range selected should only be those rows which contain data in columns A to
G.

It is too fiddly to do this manually each day but it would be great if a macro
could automate the process.

Is this possible? Any ideas on how to do this?

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Cheers . . . JC