Thanks! That worked in the A9 cell, but it didn't format the other cells in the row no matter how or where I entered the formula.

In my spreadsheet, the character in the "A" cell determines the formatting for that row. Up until now I've been formatting the color manually. But I wanted to assign a conditional formatting formula with a different background color for each of the characters that might appear in the "A" cell. I should think it would work - it's just a command - but it doesn't. It may be a bug. Or my logic may be incorrect in figuring out how the feature is supposed to work.