Formulas cannot return color formats so you would have to use Conditional
Formatting or event code.

If you did find a solution, keep in mind that Excel is limited to 56 colors
so the "hundreds of schools" being a unique color is impossible without
extensive code.


Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP

On Sun, 10 Aug 2008 08:58:00 -0700, Excel User
wrote:

Please keep in mind that there are hundreds of school names, so stringing if
statements for each school is not practical/possible. Thanks.

"Excel User" wrote:

I have the following on one worksheet:

A B
School 1 (formatted in green) Nickname 1 (formatted in green)
School 2 (formatted in blue) Nickname 2 (formatted in blue)

On my second worksheet I have a cell that looks up school and returns
corresponding nickname using vlookup. What I need is to have the cell with
vlookup also show the formatting. So if that cell looked up Nickname 1, it
would have green formatting.