Tom,
Thanks for the tip, but I consider myself a little more than a novice when
it comes to excel. I have tried to create a table on a seperate worksheet,
but I must be doing something wrong, because when I do this and do the
conditional formatting, nothing happens. I must be doing something wrong.

"Tom Ogilvy" wrote:

Setup a table on another sheet that assigns a numerical score to each letter
combination

A+ 99
A 98
A- 97
B+ 96
B 95
B- 94
C+ 93
C 92
C- 91

then in you conditional formula instead of referencing the cell with a
letter rating directly, use vlookup to change it to a value

assume D20 and D21 have letter ratings

=If(vlookup(D21,Table,2,False)Vlookup(D20,Table,2 ,False),"Up","Down")

as an example usage. Hopefully you can incorporate that into your formulas.

--
Regards,
Tom Ogilvy

"craftwoodman" wrote in message
...
I have a problem that I need to get resolved as soon as possible and need
help. I have created a tracking sheet for some stock investments I have.
The web site I use for information is a pay site that uses alpha and
numeric
characters to show strength and weakness. I have no problem with the
number
part of this, but the alpha part is driving me crazy. I need to have the
alpha characters in the following sequence of order. A+, A, A-, B+, B, B-,
C+, C, C-, etc...., but when I use the same =AND formula that I use for
the
numbers the sequence comes out like this. A+, A-, A, B+, B-, B, etc....
I
am shading the cell red if the number or letter decreases, green if it
increases and yellow if it stays the same. Since A is suppose to follow
A+
and be higher in ranking than A- it should show green if A- was in the
cell
above it in the column and it doesn't it shows red as if it were a worse
rating. Can someone help me figure this out???? Thanks in advance for
your
time.