You can use Excel 4 macro in a defined name formula to check if cell has a
formula, using you example
do insertnamedefine, in the source box put

=GET.CELL(6,Sheet1!$A1)

and in the name box type in something descriptive like

FormulaIs

click OK


Select A1:A3
with A1 as the active cell, do formatconditional formatting, select formula
is
and use

=LEFT(FormulaIs)="="

or in a pedagogic manner

=LEFT(FormulaIs,1)="="

you can actually leave out 1 if you just want one character

now click the format button and select format and click OK twice


--


Regards,


Peo Sjoblom





"Jean-Marc" wrote in message
...
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?