I have a column where I wish to highlight certain values. I have highlighted the column, then done Format > Conditional > Condition > “Formula is” from dropdown and then tried
OR("deu";"fra";"rus")
OR(="deu";="fra";="rus")
OR("=deu";"=fra";"=rus")
but it’s not working. What am I missing? (Apostrophes not commas because it’s a German sheet so commas are used as decimals. I tried all the above with commas anyway but still nothing worked.)
Why do you want to insert all the possible options into one formula? It is much easier to apply multiple separate conditions
If you still want to use the formula, then try something similar to
ISNUMBER(MATCH(A1;{"deu";"fra";"rus"};0))
Or, using the (inefficient, becoming unmaintainable) approach OP used initially:
OR(A1="deu";A1="fra";A1="rus")Thanks, that did the trick. I got stuck for a sec because my column was in J but once I changed A1 to J1 all was good.
I prefer it this way because I anticipate making many changes to it, and the list of values might grow quite long.
@mikekaganski thank you for your formula. I was wondering why it was inefficient but can see the redundancy now with the “A1=” repeats. But it was still very useful to learn how to properly formulate that OR statement.
To design complicated formulas for ConditionalFormatting is a doubtabl approach. In the given case the formulas even contain “hard-coded” string portions which may need changes once in a while.
Wherever possible I would prefer to introduce some helpers usable to simplify the formulas needed for CF - and probably allowing for an adaption of the CF working “on the fly”.
Not for “real work” but only to exemplify my suggestions, I attach an example file:
disask66878PremiumCondtionalFormatting.ods (17.3 KB)