I am setting up a "holiday" chart and would like to assign a text colour for each member of staff. How can I ensure that the colour I assign will also assign itself to the relevent cells where that person's holidays are recorded.

Hi Jenny

Thanks for your question.

I am assuming when you refer to a 'holiday chart' you mean you are using a spreadsheet as a calendar where you are recording people's schedules, including their time off.

There is a feature in Excel called conditional formatting that may help you. Here is an example of how you could use it:

1. Go to Format - Conditional formatting on the menu.

2. Here you can get Excel to apply formatting based on a criteria (condition) that you specify. For example you could that if the cell value is equal to holiday, then the cell turns blue. You can choose the format you want for the cell by clicking the Format button in the Conditional Formatting box.

3. Click OK.

You can test this by typing holiday into a cell - it should turn the colour you specify.

If you want to have different colours for different people, then you would need to set up conditional formatting for each separate person, using different words for each person (so when you typed those words into a cell they would turn the colour assigned to that person).

Maybe you could use their initials or give each person a number so you don't have to type much into the cell in order to make it change colour.

I hope this makes sense - it might take a bit of time to set up initially but you only need to do this once in your spreadsheet then its done.

Amanda

For up to 3 names only try playing around with format-->conditional formatting. You can have the matching criteria as a name, value or formula. Can't think how to do more than three though.