Pete,
Thanks your suggestion worked, much appreciated!

Mike

"Pete_UK" wrote:

Highlight all the cells you want this to apply to (assume the first of
these is A1), then click on Format | Conditional Formatting and in the
dialogue box choose Formula Is rather than Cell Value Is in the first
box. Enter this formula in the next box:

=OR(A1="",ISNUMBER(SEARCH("missing",A1)))

Click on the format button and the Patterns Tab to choose your
highlight colour. Click OK (twice) to apply these settings - Excel
will automatically adjust the cell references to suit your selected
cells, but if your first cell was not A1 then you will have to make
the appropriate changes to the formula I gave you.

Hope this helps.

Pete

On Jun 24, 3:16 pm, watermt wrote:
I'm attempting to do some conditional formatting on text. I need to
highlight cells that contain the word missing and also any cells that were
left blank.

is this possible?