In Lotus 123 there was a function that caused the cells to blink off and on.



For example, using an "if function" if the value was not true, it would return a value of "False" in the cell and the word would be in red and blinking.

Does Excel (2010) have such a function that would cause the value in a cell to blink?

No, though it does have conditional formatting that could make the cell change colour. You could use an time-driven macro, but the effects are pretty awful...

As an example: To make a cell flash every second if it's value is 1, use conditional formatting in the target cell, with the formula:
=AND(MOD(VALUE(TEXT(NOW(),"ss")),2)=0,A1=1)
and set the conditional format to whatever font/background/border arrangement you want. Then add the following macro to the workbook:
Run the macro and the target cell will flash if your criterion is met. Of course, rather than having to run the macro manually, you could use something like a event to trigger the macro.
Note: change "A1" in the above references to any cell that does not contain a formula - unless you actually want the nominated cell to recalculate every second.
Once the above has been done, all you need to do to make other cells flash is to copy the conditional format to those cells, changing nothing more than the "A1=1" argument to whatever 'flash' criterion you want. For example, if you want more than one cell to flash if "A1=1" , change "A1=1" to "$A$1=1" and apply/copy the format to those cells also.

You could even get fancy, having up to three (or more in Excel 2007 & later) sequential flashes of the cell, by adding conditional format arguments and making the conditional format formulae, in turn:
=AND(MOD(VALUE(TEXT(NOW(),"ss")),4)=1,A1=1)
=AND(MOD(VALUE(TEXT(NOW(),"ss")),4)=2,A1=1)
=AND(MOD(VALUE(TEXT(NOW(),"ss")),4)=3,A1=1)
Be warned, though, routines like this can chew up CPU resources (i.e. they slow things down).

As I said, the effects are pretty awful. For one thing, you'll lose any ability to copy/paste or undo while the macro is running - and the undo buffer will be cleared so you won't even be able to undo anything afterwards.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

I read somewhere that the use of blinking cells is not advisable as it might induce epileptic reactions .

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That's theoretically possible, but photosensitive epilepsy (to which only a very small percentage of the population is susceptible) is generally triggered by cycles of around 4Hz - or 4 times as fast as my macro updates - and typically involves red flashing. So, provided you avoid red-spectrum flashing with cycle times approaching 4Hz there shouldn't be a problem.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]