Thanks, but you misunderstood my question. I am familiar with the operation
of conditional formats. Here is a simple example of what I want to achieve:
Cell A1 contains value '1'
Cell A2 contains value '2'
Cell A3 contains formula '=SUM(A1:A2)'

Now what I would like is for cell A3 to be shown on a blue background,
because it is a formula, whilst cells A1 and A2 should remain in the default
format, because they are manually entered values. Basically is there an Excel
function that is able to detect whether a cell is a formula or a single
value? In other words, if the cell entry starts with '=', then I would like
it to be formatted differently. Sounds easy, but I am stumped. Excel seems to
only consider the *Value* in a cell, but not whether that value comes from a
manual entry or a formula calculation.

"Yong Heng" wrote:

sure.

here's an example

A B C D E F G
1 no1 no2 no3 no4 no5 no6
2 ticket1 2 15 26 27 36 38
3 ticket2 1 12 13 15 24 34
4 ticket3 3 5 20 28 37 40
5
6 drawn 3 15 25 26 47 49

1. Select cells B2:G4
2. Select Conditional Formatting
3. Choose Formula Is (as opposed to Cell value is)
4. For the formula, use the CountIf function:
=COUNTIF($B$6:$G$6,B2)
5. Click the Format button.
6. Select formatting options (choose a color for the cell), click OK

What happens is that the conditional formatting formula will evaluate each
cell to see if it should "count" according to the criteria. Once it is
"counted", it will apply the format to the cell.

Try it, its fun.

Yong Heng


"Jean-Marc" wrote:

Is there a way (conditional formatting?) to apply a different format to cells
that contain a formula, as opposed to cells that have a directly entered
value?