Ah! Perfect. That was it. Thank you.

When CF applied as:

=Trim(A1)<Trim(B1)

worked beautifully.

On Jun 12, 5:13 pm, "T. Valko" wrote:
Your CF formula should work if you applied it correctly to the range of
cells so you need to look at other possibilities.

Test that the matches do in fact match:

A1 = Smith
B1 = Smith

=A1=B1

If the result is FALSE test for unseen characters in one or the other
column:

=LEN(A1)=LEN(B1)

The character length of both cells should be the same.

Biff

"gin" wrote in message

oups.com...



Hi - using Excel 2003:

I'm stumped on conditional formatting for a comparing 2 columns of
text values per row.

So ....

Current Compare Contract#
Name To

A B C
Smith Smith 123456
Jones Greenburg 111222
Johnson Johnson 222111

Column B, Row 2 should be Highlighted

Here's the conditional formatting I've applied:
FormulaIs = B1<A1

& then paste the formula down column B

This has the effect of highlighting every cell, where it seems to
evaluate to true all the time. Try this with different variations of $
$$$ & it's about the same effect.

Two things to mention:

1.) I use this same method on a column with Number values & it works
perfectly
2.) The names in column B are based on the following formula:

=INDEX(PI_Last,MATCH(B2,Contract,0))

Where PI_Last is a named range of text (names) on another sheet in the
workbook and Contract is a named range of text values on the current
spreadsheet (Col C). I'm trying to compare where the names are
different for same contract between the two spreadsheets.

Thanks in advance for help.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -