I agree, that was an error on my part, thnks

"David Biddulph" wrote:

Usually wise to advise the use of =A1
If you just type A1 into the box after selecting equal to, or less than, or
whatever, Excel tends to try to be "helpful" and change it to ="A1", thus
looking for text string A1, rather than cell reference A1. Typing =A1 into
the box should avoid that problem.
--
David Biddulph

"Mike H" wrote in message
...
Hi,

Select your data excluding A1 then apply 3 conditional formats of

Cell Value - Less than A1 Pick Red
Cell Value - Greater than A1 Pick Green
Cell Value - Equal to A1 Pick yellow

Not the references are relative i.e no $ sign
Click Ok

Mike

" wrote:

To those who understand these things better than me...

I have a column of data that contains information about visitors to my
website.
E.g.

Column A
1 | 101
2 | 126
3 | 211
4 | 199
5 | 165
6 | 205

I want to apply some conditional formatting to THAT column, depending
on whether the previous number was lower or higher than the number in
question.

So,

If A2<A1, then show cell A2 as red (because the number of hits went
down for period 2.
however, if A2A1, then show cell A2 as green (because the number of
hits went up).
and if A2 = A1 then show cell A2 as yellow (no change)

So, the colours for the cells should be :



1 | 101 not coloured, as is the first set of numbers
2 | 126 green (number went up)
3 | 211 green (number went up)
4 | 199 red (number went down)
5 | 165 red (number went down)
6 | 205 green (number went up)


I know that I could simply add an additional column of data, and do A2-
A1 to see if the value is negative or not, and then colour the cells
according whether a - exists, but i'm trying to produce a spreadsheet
with as few columns of data as possible.

Any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated. It's really
annoying now, because i'm sure that there's a SIMPLE way of doing it,
that i've just missed.

Thanks in advance,

Rachael