How to format a cell to turn a color based on the text value of a cell that corresponds to a list of text values

Question

In cells A1:A500 I have names like "Fred Flintstone" for example. In cells B1:B500, I have a drop down box that indicates "PASS" or "FAIL". In cells AA1:AA500 I have created a formula that will pull only the names from A1:A500 that have "FAIL" in their respective B1:B500 column.

What conditional formula could I use so that in cells C1:C500, they will turn yellow if there is a name on the list of names that is contained in AA1:AA500?

So if A1 equals "Fred Flintstone" and he is a "FAIL" in B1, his name gets put into AA1. I then need Cell C1 to turn yellow based on the fact that his name appeared on the AA list.

Answer 1

Click on cell C1 and apply conditional formatting with the "formula is" option:

=COUNTIF(AA:AA,A1)=1

and pick yellow as the background color.

Then copy C1 and PasteSpecialFormats to the rest of column C

Answer 2

You can use MATCH to see if the name appears in column AA. I suggest something like this:

1. Select the cells to be highlighted (make sure that you start with cell C1 to make it the active cell).

   

2. Insert the MATCH formula, wrapped in ISNUMBER to get a boolean value. MATCH returns a number (the row number of a match) or an error (if there are no matches):

   

   =isnumber(match(A1,AA$1:AA$500,0))
   

   And make sure you have the appropriate format picked.

3. Click OK and you should be done: