you can simply select the name and change the colour. However, there is one thing to note when doing this: MS Project will never again automatically change the colour (for instance to show that the task is critical) even when you set the colour back to "automatic". This is frustrating so I tend to colour only one cell, for instance, a date or ID field in the row when I want to flag a task for attention later. If you are looking for automatically changing the text colour based on a flag you can change the "marked" text colour so that a highlight filter will change the colour however this is only one colour and not the multiple options that condition formatting in Excel lets you have. The only other colour change is for the Critical path.