Excel: Keeping New Entries Green for 5 Days

Question

At my company, I have an excel sheet with around 400 records of our inventory. The spreadsheet has sorting built right into it and gets re-ordered several times a day. As new inventory is entered in, I want to make a conditional formatting rule that keeps the new row(s) green for 5 days to let our salespeople know that these entries are new.

I have tried conditional formatting rules, but the rules stick to whatever row number that entry was in at the time, and does not stay on the same record when I sort the file. Is there a way to set my conditional formatting rules to hold on to a specific inventory tag number?

Also, it might be worth noting that I'm currently the only one still stuck on one of our older computers, so I'm using Excel 2003 while everyone else accesses this file using 2007/2010.

Thanks in advance for your help! Collin Helmers

Answer 1

Maybe you could add a "Date Added" column which can be populated with the date that the record was added (I guess you'd need to train the people to start doing this). Then if you apply conditional format to the whole column, you can use the NOW() function to determine the age of the entry and format accordingly.