=IF(U30,U1,"")

what i really want is for this to look in u4 and then u5 and so on until it
finds a 1 or a (1) and if it finds the negative (1) turn the reported number
red.

then in the next adjacent cell in the the formula to look for the next cell
that contains a number so if the first one found a number in u4 then i would
need this one to ignor that and look at u5 and so on.

i tried to use LARGE which i think is right but i'm doing something wrong. i
only need to find the first 6 columns that have a 1 in them because there
would never be more than 6 columns that contain a 1.

i will be searching about 40 columns.