Conditional Formatting Rules Duplicating When a Cell Is Copied

Question

We are running Excel 14.3.9 under OS 10.9.1. Problem happens on multiple machines running Excel 2011 on the Mac.

Copy and pasting cells were taking a considerable amount of time. After discovering the blog post, "What Can Cause Slow Copy and Paste in Excel" I looked into conditional formatting rules in our Excel document.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/the\_microsoft\_excel\_support\_team\_blog/archive/2011/09/08/what-can-cause-slow-copy-and-paste-in-excel.aspx

None of the other items i the blog post mattered—except for the number of conditional formatting rules. We removed them, and sure enough, everything sped up, but then as you copied and pasted cells containing conditional formatting, the conditional formatting rules were duplicated.

After a Google Search about the problem, it appears this was an issue in previous versions of Excel for Windows (but was fixed in later versions).

Any ideas on what is causing this issue? Is this a bug? If so, this is a major pain for our accounting department and is taking up our staff's precious time.

Excel 2008 did not have this problem.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Use Paste Special instead of Paste. Notice the option to Merge Conditional Formatting.

If you find a particular combination of Paste Special options to be to your liking, record a macro that does those particular things and make a button, menu item, and/or keyboard shortcut to launch your macro so that you have it always available to you.

Answer 2

Well, when the conditional formatting rules keep getting duplicated and duplicated from copying and pasting to the point that Excel 2011 becomes so completely unusably slow when copying and pasting on two different high end machines then it is a problem and a bug.

My understanding was that there was a similar bug in Excel 2007, and that there was a fix for it:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/973823.

Any similar fixes or workarounds in Mac Excel 2011? Obviously you can go in and constantly trim down your rules, but this is a pain. Reverting to Excel 2008 or using Apple's Pages resolves the issue as well, but this is not necessarily a long-term solution. But it might be the way we have to go.

Thanks!

Tyler

Answer 3

From your description, I'm not exactly sure what you think the problem is. When a cell is copied, the conditional formatting rules for that cell are supposed to be copied to the destination. If this is not happening, it is a bug.