Excel 2007 - Conditional Formatting: Font reverts to Cambria

Whenever I use conditional formatting the font changes to Cambria (size 10 or something). I can't change the font nor its size using the [home, conditional formatting, manage rules, edit rule, format, 'font'] tab. It's all greyed out! It looks like a bug? I've seen posts on th开发者_JS百科is on the web but no answers. What now?

(Ps I'm using Windows XP SP2. We're going to upgrade to Windows 7 in a few months, which might make the problem go away.)

The way to fix this is :

• Open the conditional formatting window
• On the Font tab, click the button at the bottom right called Clear. This will remove all the settings on the Font tab - crucially, including the font itself, so that no font is selected at all.
• Then put back all of the other Font settings (like colour, italics etc) and then it will not change the font.

this may be a little late, but I found this site when searching for a solution, so maybe someone else can benefit from the information.

Office 2010 also seems to disable Conditional Formatting while you have Tracking enabled. In my case, disabling tracking fixed the problem. You can then create the conditional formatting and re-enable tracking.

Hope this helps someone out!

G

I have conditionally formatted some cells, and I have observed the behavior you describe. You can only change:

1. the font style (regular/italic/bold/bold italic)
2. whether it is underlined
3. the color.

I conditionally formatted the cells so that it turned red if the cell equals 10.

I later went back and changed the regular formatting of the cells so that they were all Arial 12 point. The cell with 10 remained red.

I don't think this is a bug, but rather a more subtle way to encourage you to make better font choices. You can underline it or turn it red, but it seems like Excel won't let you make it a 40 point Haettenschweiler.

Edit: You mentioned that these were Excel 2003 spreadsheets that you are working with in Excel 2007. Have you been saving the spreadsheets in .xls or in .xlsx format? The inconsistent spreadsheet behavior you observe may be caused because Excel is trying to preserve Excel 2003 behavior. I recommend that you save it to Excel 2007 format (.xlsx) and see if the conditional formatting works better. (See comment trail for the full story.)

I actually had the same exact problem. Thanks to this question (and the discussions in it), some other research, and some random stabbing in the dark, I came to a 'solution'. It's not clean and exact and I can't explain it, but it worked for me. Hopefully, it is useful for others.

Why Conditional Formatting is disabled: To expand on one of rajah9's comments, the reason you can't change font in Conditional Formatting is discussed here where it says:

...the reason behind disabling those items for Conditional Formatting was that they (MS) assumed that changing attribute that would modify the column width or row height should not be allowed in CF.

Another user echoes here:

...Conditional formatting does not support changing anything that might change the overall format of the worksheet. Changing the font could result in data being cut off unless the column is made wider because the characters in the font might require more space (as an example). Thus size is not an option either.

So, you can't do it because MS doesn't trust you with it. That would be livable if it weren't for that fact that MS DOES change it.

Saving the spreadsheet in .xlsx would work, but some of us, myself included, have to support Excel 2003 users.

My setup: I am currently working with Excel 2010 with a .xls file that was created in Excel 2003. I noticed the conditional formatting formulas in one worksheet undesirably changed the font, while the other worksheet left it alone. This led me to believe that the desired behavior COULD be achieved.

Solution: I created a new worksheet. Then, I copied and pasted any borders, text, formulas, etc. from the old worksheet into the new one. Also, I redid any CFs I originally needed. Finally, I deleted the old worksheet, with the new, essentially identical one, in its place. The final result was all my CFs worked properly and didn't change the font!

This was all achieved in Excel 2010 and saved as the original .xls format. Every time I reopen the file after this change, my font remains intact.

As mentioned, I can't quite explain it, but it seems the old worksheet maintained something that caused this inconsistent behavior and recreating it in 2010 removed the hidden gremlin.

I know this is an old and possibly obsolete topic but it may still be handy for Excel 2003 users encountering this issue. In my case, I was using conditional formatting to color alternating rows based on =mod(row(),2)= 1 or 0. Most of the time this worked fine but on one sheet, it was causing alternating rows to also have different size text (8 and 10 I believe).

When I went into the conditional formatting dialogue under font, the text size was greyed out as others have described. However, the Strikethrough option was checked. Unchecking this fixed the issue.

I'm not sure why this happened as I didn't use strikethrough anywhere in the workbook.

I may have also found a "work-around". I have a CF rule in place on an ".xls" sheet, but the returned font face is not at all what I want and I have not had this problem with my other rules.

So I tried this . . . . I left the CF rule in place for column B, then I chose column B again and used the "highlight cells rules" option -- instead of going straight to the "new rule" choice.

My choice was "text that contains". I entered the text I am looking for in the first box, chose the "custom format" in the 2nd box. I unclicked the Strikethrough check box (just to be safe) and chose the color I wanted.

I clicked OK, and the font face and size reverted to what the cell was originally formated for.

Don't really know why that worked, but VERY glad it did.

In excel 2010 there is a clear formatting option under the font tab. I cleared the format and it removed the default cambria that was set in my settings. I was then able to modify the available options, but the grayed out font was then blank.

I know this string is old, but I just HAD to write and tell:

• This is clearly a bug. Those who say different haven't read the whole context
• My experience is that the bug remains with both .xls and with .xlsx
• The question is not really whether you may change the font for the conditional formatting.
• The question is that Excel suddenly thinks Cambria is a default that cannot be changed and that looks very different from the Calibri.
• Changing the format for the whole spreadsheet has no affect at all as this is a bug assosiated with default format for the the outcome of a condition of a cell.
• This is a bug assosiated with an init-state problem.

Solution:

• The above-mentioned "clear formatting" forces the code to the correct initial state. This solves the problem in my case
• For me this was the only way around, even though I had to manually do this for a certain cell and then copy the cell content to all cells that had inherited this bug.

Conclusion:

• It is a bug
• It remains as a follower from the init-state for the conditional formatting.
• Clear format might not work for everyone (reading the above) so I guess some people will have to re-do the programming on an unifected cell...

I know this may be a belated answer but it's quite an easy one for anyone working in excel 2007 - I had this problem too where all I wanted to do was change the colour of the text but for some reason excel was also changing the font to Cambria.

In the conditional formatting/ edit rule dialogue box, I just pressed the 'clear' button in the bottom right corner which reverted the text to plain black with no bold/ italic etc. I then immediately reset my rule, applying a different colour and bold style, pressed OK and this then seemed to work. The text did not change to Cambria.

Hope this helps for anyone who is still having the problem.