Use conditional formatting. Unfortunately if you have Excel 2003 or
earlier, you can only set 3 rules, meaning 3 different colors.

Select the entire range, activate first cell. My example is a list of
random numbers in cells A1:A42. I select the entire range, and
activate A1.

Then, in conditional formatting dialog box use "Formula is" and type
in this:

=A1=SMALL($A$1:$A$42,1)

This will return TRUE for the smallest number in range. Select
Format, and choose a different font color.

For second smallest number, use this "Formula is" rule:

=A1=SMALL($A$1:$A$42,2)

The opposite of this is the LARGE() function. Largest number in range
will be found like this:

=A1=LARGE($A$1:$A$42,1)

Once you've made up the rules, recalc a few times to ensure you are
getting the correct behavior.


On Oct 9, 2:48 pm, dlbeiler
wrote:
I have a column of random numbers and need to find the smallest, second
smallest, third smallest, third largest, second largest, largest and
highlight these numbers with different font colors.