Why is my conditional formatting all wrong?

Question

"Didi" is not "Taxi", why did conditional formatting mark it as such?

It has also randomly missed some "Taxi" rows, These are all filled out via dropdown lists to remove any accidental spaces and i checked the ones that got missed, no leading or trailing spaces. so not sure what is happening, just trying to make a more readable data set.

Edit: I should also note that it isn't just "Didi" being affected, some "Uber" etc. are. it seems very random which rows are colored

Answer 1

You have applied the conditional format to entire columns that include the first row. When using the formula, it must be applied to the first row of the "Applies to" range.

Try the following

$S1 = "Taxi"

Because the column headers are not a match, it should not affect the end result.

Alternatively, you can set the applies to range from row 2 to the bottom when your formula will apply to the top cell of the "Applies to" range.

Answer 2

Thankyou. once i changed it to $S1= it worked as intended, so I've now been able to determine the additional rules needed,

somewhere said $<letter>2 does the same thing but i guess those numbers are for different things to 1?

The formula must apply to the start of the "Applied to" range. If entire columns are used for the "Applied to" range, then the first cells are always row1. If the "Applied to" range starts on row 2, then the formula must apply to row 2 because row 2 is the start of the "Applied to" range.

Answer 3

Thankyou. once i changed it to $S1= it worked as intended, so I've now been able to determine the additional rules needed,

somewhere said $<letter>2 does the same thing but i guess those numbers are for different things to 1?