Conditional formatting to hide cell content even when printed

excel conditional-formatting excel-2008
Jeff Erickson picture Jeff Erickson · Mar 9, 2011 · Viewed 47.5k times · Source

I would like to set up a conditional formatting setting that would hide the contents (the cell should look blank) if the cell's contents is equal to another cell. Does anyone know of a function to do this? I tried just making the font the same color as the background (gray, in this case), but unfortunately when this is printed, there is some sort of residue shadow left over from the text.

Here is what happens when I do gray on gray (they are supposedly the same color):

Gray on gray still shows up

I am using Excel 2008 on the Mac.

Answer

mpalanco picture mpalanco · Jun 20, 2015

Below in A2 we have the conditional formatting that hides the content of that cell if it is equal to B2.

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In Conditional Formatting create the following rule: =$A$2=$B$2, then press Format...

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  1. On the Format menu, click Cells, and then click the Number tab.
  2. Under Category, click Custom.
  3. In the Type box, type ;;; (that is, three semicolons in a row), and then click OK.

enter image description here

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