Hi,
not sure whether I asked this before. Is there a way to use the conditional highlighting for cells that contain a formula and do not return "" ? Basically highlight any result exept if the formula doesn't return anyting.
Your double-negative in the description makes this a little harder to wrap my head around, but I think I get what you want.
The best way to think of this is through a conditional map of the options:
1) Cell is blank (no formula) -> Do nothing
2) Cell has a formula that returns "" -> Do nothing
3) Cell has a formula that returns a result -> Highlight
To implement this in Numbers' Conditional Highlighting, you need a blank cell (anywhere on the sheet is fine) and couple of rules, knowing that rules are run in a first-match basis:
The first rule filters out the cells that are blank - although I set the text to be italic, it really doesn't matter what text formatting you set here since the cell is blank and there's no text to format.
If we get past Rule 1 we know the cell has some formula, so now we need to check if the result is not empty. We do that by comparing its value to the empty cell (here you can see I chose cell E1, but any empty cell is fine). If the cell value is not the same as E1 (empty), then I set the Red Fill format.
Yes, correct. The double negative comes form the thing that Numbers doesn't consider the result of "" as blank, even if the cell doesn't output anything and is therefor blank to the user. Blank is not "".
Thanks for your description, that helped. I thought I might have missed something. Just tried your suggestion and found out, that it's enough to reference a random empty cell (either totally blank or containing ="" ) in the condition sidebar. It will tell Numbers that I want to target cells that return nothing, and that includes "". It would be nice if the input field in the sidebar would act the same way, basically leaving it blank includes formula results of "".
Not ideal but at least a workaround.
papalapapp wrote:
It would be nice if the input field in the sidebar would act the same way, basically leaving it blank includes formula results of "".
Yes it would. I agree it should. It is odd to me that it does not, when "is blank" is not an alternative. You can suggest that to Apple via Numbers->Provide Numbers Feedback
Conditional highlighting for results that arte not ""
