Automatically change background color whether cell contains text and/or no text (including numbers and symbols)

adoseofdatatoxin · June 28, 2025, 4:14pm

I’m porting all my spreadsheets into this program (trying to increase privacy and security from Google and Microsoft) and I’m having trouble doing some things. I’ll start by saying that I only used google sheets and excel to do a couple projects last year, so I had to search for answers to do this exact thing before.

Anyways, I’m trying to change a cell’s background color depending on whether its empty (red) or filled (green), I’ve tried i couple formulas (=ISBLANK)/ cell values (included in screenshot

) I found online but they didn’t work. any help would be helpful.

joshua4 · June 28, 2025, 5:32pm

Perhaps you are wanting more that first meets the eye, but it seems like a clear application of having multiple conditions under conditional formatting just as you started with. However, use the ‘is equal to’ for the first condition, then use ‘formula is’ for the second–that seems to work. The tricky thing is that spreadsheet programs treat 0’s and empty strings ("") and truly blank cells differently sometimes, the same sometimes, etc. But this should get you started.

NOTE: The D5 is the top left corner of the conditionally formatted range–the first part of the range address under Cell Range. That’s a little bit ‘magical,’ to reference the value of any cell itself within a conditional format you use the (relative) address of the top left cell of the format range.

adoseofdatatoxin · June 28, 2025, 6:25pm

This worked almost exactly the way I wanted, I just had to change d5 to c2 as that was the top left most cell in the range, which is kinda confusing and ‘magical’.
Now I just need to figure out how to get cells to resize with text wrap and if there is a way to get cells to give me a drop down list to select from a preset list of options, such as Yes, No, or a calendar, ect. In Google Sheets this was done with Data Validation, but that’s a whole new question post in and of itself.
Thanks, you had a fast answer for this inexperienced spreadsheet maker.