Thanks Joel, This looks like the right approach, I was only hoping for a non
VBA solution as I am not a programmer. The active condition is exactly what I
need ( not the trick is to get it to work to return a sum for a stack of
cells..

"Joel" wrote:

You need a complcated macro to determine the colors that are being displyed
from a conditional formated cell. See webpage below for more detailed
explanation and a sample of the code you would need.

http://www.cpearson.com/Excel/CFColors.htm

"raking08" wrote:

Is there a way to assign a specific value to a "stoplight conditions (
without having to write a complicated "if" statement in order to summarize a
group of individual rules into a single "stoplight" when the actual data does
not normalize easily. ?

in other words, is there something behind the scenes in conditional
formating that "knows" that a cell is red, yellow or green that can be
combined into in new summary rules ?

I am rolling up a 100 query dashboard into small groups