Conditionally Highlighting Cells Containing Formulas

You probably already know that you can select all the cells containing formulas in a worksheet by pressing F5 and choosing Special | Formulas. If you need to keep a constant eye on where formulas are located, then repeatedly doing the selecting can get tedious. A better solution is to use the conditional formatting capabilities of Excel to highlight cells with formulas.

Before you can use conditional formatting, however, you need to create a user-defined function that will return True or False, depending on whether there is a formula in a cell. The following macro will do the task very nicely:

Function HasFormula(rCell As Range) As Boolean
    Application.Volatile
    HasFormula = rCell.HasFormula
End Function

To use this with conditional formatting, select the cells you want checked, and then follow these steps:

1. With the Home tab of the ribbon displayed, click the Conditional Formatting option in the Styles group. Excel displays a palette of options related to conditional formatting.
2. Choose New Rule. Excel displays the New Formatting Rule dialog box.
3. In the Select a Rule Type area at the top of the dialog box, choose Use a Formula to Determine Which Cells to Format. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The New Formatting Rule dialog box.

4. In the Format Values Where This Formula Is True box, enter "=HasFormula(A1)" (without the quote marks). If the active cell in the range that you selected is not A1, you'll need to modify the formula slightly to reflect whatever cell is active.
5. Click Format to display the Format Cells dialog box.
6. Use the controls in the Format Cells dialog box to specify how you want the cells formatted.
7. Click OK to close the Format Cells dialog box.
8. Click OK.

Microsoft introduced the ISFORMULA function with Excel 2013. The ISFORMULA function allows you to highlight cells that contain formulas without using a macro. To use this function with conditional formatting, select the cells you want checked, and then follow these steps:

1. With the Home tab of the ribbon displayed, click the Conditional Formatting option in the Styles group. Excel displays a palette of options related to conditional formatting.
2. Choose New Rule. Excel displays the New Formatting Rule dialog box.
3. In the Select a Rule Type area at the top of the dialog box, choose Use a Formula to Determine Which Cells to Format.
4. In the Format Values Where This Formula Is True box, enter "=ISFORMULA(A1)" (without the quote marks). If the active cell in the range that you selected is not A1, you'll need to modify the formula slightly to reflect whatever cell is active.
5. Click Format to display the Format Cells dialog box.
6. Use the controls in the Format Cells dialog box to specify how you want the cells formatted. For instance, you can select a fill color for the cells with formulas.
7. Click OK to close the Format Cells dialog box.
8. Click OK.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (9900) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Excel in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Conditionally Highlighting Cells Containing Formulas.