Is anyone any good with excel?

[Bensmum1982]

I know that this is not the right place for this but my head is going to explode and I would be so grateful if anyone could help.

I am working on an excel document that goes over three sheets.
I need to find a way that if a cell in sheet 2 is written in that it changes the colour of the same cell in sheet 3 so that other people know that they have to put some data into it.
I am quickly losing the will to live after two nights working and getting nowhere.
Any help would be amazing.

Is it text or number?

Not at my laptop at the moment, but what you want to do is called conditional formatting, if that's any help. I'll be able to give you more help tomorrow if you still need it.

It’s text on sheet two.
People would have to put numbers into the cell that changed colour in sheet 3.

Thank you for replying

Thank you so much @WhitePhantom
I know how to use conditional formatting in one sheet but can’t work out how to get it to copy the colour into the other sheet.

Yes it can be done. I would go with something like =if(sheet1a1=?? ,1,"") then use conditioning format to turn the cell a colour if it =1.

I can go through more tomorrow as I'm on my phone at the moment.

I’m so rusty I could squeak , but wouldn’t this be a job for Visual Basic scripting? Add code to the Worksheet Change event to see what cell was changed and then add formatting to the target sheet cell?

www.dummies.com/software/microsoft-office/excel/highlight-excel-cells-based-on-the-value-of-another-cell/

Thank you all so much. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your help.
I don’t know why I didn’t ask last night instead of doing endless google searches that just confused me.
Some of the answers online referred to VBS but I have no idea what it is or what to do with it Trapped

The following works - create a conditional formatting rule on Sheet3, I have done this for cell B3, the formula to use is this:

=IF(Sheet2!B3="", FALSE, TRUE)

So the colour gets set if that formula returns true, which it does when B3 on sheet to is not empty.

Thank again everyone.
Unfortunately I don’t seem to be able to get that to work @testing987654321
I am assuming that I put it into a new rule in conditional formatting?
I have also tried with changing ‘sheet2’ to the name that I have given the sheet.

Ah ignore that. It does work. Thank you so so much!!!!!

Is there a way to make it do the same for other cells without having to type it in separately?

Is there a way to make it do the same for other cells without having to type it in separately?

Autofill it. Grab the tiny little square at the corner and drag it down and/or across the range you want filling. If you use the cell reference format testing suggested, then it will update the cell references for you as it goes.

Thank you. I did try that but it’s just highlighted them all blue. As though it is still using the original cell as it’s reference for all of them.

What's the actual contents of the cell you are trying to replicate ? If the cell reference is in the form A1, then it should be relative, so that moving a cell down from it it's updated to B1

If it's $A$1, then it's an absolute reference and will always point to that cell, wherever you autofill or copy the original cell too.

Any more than that, and it's back to my "Excel for dummies" .

The cell references don’t seem to come up as a1. They are coming up as r5c10.
They contain text.

Does that help at all. I am a bit clueless.

If you're still having problems this evening I could look at it again, but at work now.

That would be amazing if you get a change @testing987654321
Thank you so much.

Your options are set to display cell references as Row Number Column Number rather than the more standard format which uses alphabet for columns and numbers for rows. You’ll probably find it easier to work if you go to Options in the File menus and switch the format, because all the advice you get online will assume you’re using the A1 format.