Conditional Formatting Font Color Not Working

Question

I am trying to conditionally format my data in Office 365 Excel.  It will not allow me to change the font color in custom mode.

The dialogue box below comes up when I select Custom Format.  There is not a way for me to change the font other than font style.  It appears that there is other formatting on the cells, but I have tried to remove all previous formatting beforehand and it still gives me this.  If I select the color drop-down, it looks like it will allow  me to change, but when I select a color it reverts back to automatic.

Answer 1

Hi Luellen,

Thanks for posting on our forum, I will try my best to help you.

Firstly, we only can change the font style, underline, color and Strikethrough for Conditional, so the other options are gray, you can also check it via Format Cells dialogue:

For the issue “you can’t change the font color”, I have tested this on our side, I didn’t meet the issue.

I suggest you try the following steps to check if you can set the color:

1. Set the cells which you want to use conditional formatting.
2. Click Conditional Formatting>select New Rules.
3. Format only cells that contain>click Format>change the color.

If the issue still exists, could you please provide the following information for further analysis?

1. The version of Office. (Click File>select Account)
2. Check if all files meet the issue.

Regards,

Qing

Answer 2

Hi Qing,

Thank you for your response.  I am still having the problem and I have tried in multiple files with the same problem.  SOME times I can select a blue color, but most times it won't select anything for me.  Please see the product information below.

Answer 3

Hi Luellen,

Thanks for your updates.

First, we need to collect the Office version as below, we needn’t click About Excel:

Could you please provide it with us, I want to check if the issue is related to Office version?

Besides, I need to confirm if you have tried my steps to set conditional formatting.

If not, I suggest you try it to check the result.

If the issue still exists, could you please provide the detailed formula and the detailed steps about how to set conditional formatting?

Regards,

Qing

Answer 4

Hi Luellen,  

Can you use the feature? Do you have any updates?

Regards,

Qing

Answer 5

Good morning Qing Tang

I have to say that it is frustrating seeing several people with the same issue and getting the same stock answer from MSFT that seemingly helps no one. further more the MSFT responses treat us like children imagining that we are incapable or too stupid to read the instructions stating that you can only conditionally format these things.... particularly when we state that it is the color we are trying to change!

It is my belief that the file becomes corrupted in some way which then prevents the Conditional Formatting from working correctly. I had a similar experience with another function which necessitated recreating (copying the data), pasting into a new workbook and saving anew. This corruption does not occur all the time but probably in unique circumstances which probably accounts for why you could not duplicate the issue. recreating a new, simple spreadsheet is no big deal but some workbooks are incredibly complicated and would take a long time to recreate. So my suggestion is that for this and similar issues that seemingly cannot be resolved by simple means, is to start with shutting down and rebooting, save the project as a completely different file (Save As, new name) and try again. if that fails there needs to be a means of testing and identifying the corruption or, certainly for complicated spreadsheets, a method detailed to transfer formulas and data to a new spreadsheet which will not include any potential corrupted inherent Excel programming code. 

Thank you.