Thanks, but that's not exactly what I'm looking for (I did a pretty poor job of explaining), so instead of using a hypothetical let me just give you the real situation. I have formatted column D so that if it says--for example--"Proposal," the fill in that cell will turn red, if it says "Post-Proposal" the fill will turn orange, etc (there are 4 more categories). Columns H through Q have data that relates to the respective color in column D, so if any of those cells contain information I want them to be color-coded. However, I do not want blank cells in H:Q to have any filling. So-far, so-good; I can conditionally format H:Q so that if data is entered it automatically color codes. The problem is that if i change column D--say from Proposal to Post-Proposal (ie red to orange)--I want all of the cells in that row of H:Q that contain data to also change color. Is there a way that I can link the cells in column D to the cells in H through Q so that when column D changes color, H:Q will do so as well, all while maintaining the previous condtionallity of filling only non-blank cells?