not with conditional formatting !
When you delete B, the condition disappears, hence your formatting disappears.

What you can do is create a simple VB macro that formats A based on B. In
that way it becomes independent from B and hence if you delete B the format
stays.

I suggest that you record a macro to record the kind of formatting you want
in cell A, the edit the macro. If you need more help, let us know.
RDWJ (also Rob...)

"Rob" wrote:

I would like to compare range A to range B net out differences using
conditional formatting - differences shown in bold red font. How do I retain
range A with the result format when range B is deleted? I'm using Excel
2003. Thanks!