Find text in Excel file matching text in separate file, then apply fill color to row

Question

The goal is to find values in an Excel spreadsheet which match values in a separate list, then highlight the row with a fill color (red) where matches are found. In other words:

• Excel file A: source list (approximately 200 items)
• Excel file B: has one column containing the list we are checking; must apply fill color (red) to entire row where matches are found

Wondering what the best approach might be. I'm currently using AppleScript to highlight and sort data in a large volume of spreadsheets; a looped find checks each cell in a range for a single string of text and colors all matching rows. While this task is similar, the source list contains hundreds of items so it feels silly (and very slow) to include all this data in the actual script. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I don't know what format your original list is in, but this sounds like a job for conditional formatting, if you can get the list into Excel. You can do conditional formatting based on a formula, and you can use a VLOOKUP() formula to do it.