Excel conditional formatting based on list of cell references

Question

I need to mark the changed cells in a new version of an Excel file. Using the Compare files functionality of Excel 2013, I can get a list of changed cells:

Now I'd like to use that list of cell references to mark the corresponding cells in the Excel sheet through conditional formatting .

How do I do that? (There are hundreds of cell references, so I do not want to do it manually.)

Answer 1

You could try putting this as a formula into Conditional Formatting:-

=NOT(ISERROR(MATCH(SUBSTITUTE(ADDRESS(ROW(),COLUMN()),"$",""),Changes,0)))

where Changes is the range where you have your list of cells that don't match. I'm assuming that your list of changes do not have $ signs in them.

Here is a much more concise version of the formula as explained in the comment below.

=MATCH(ADDRESS(ROW(),COLUMN(),4),changes,0)