Excel: Why is this conditional formatting formula not working?

Question

I have an Excel spreadsheet (don't ask), with a 4x6 table with headers Day 1 , Day 2 , Day 3 , and Total . However, a formula is changing the location of the Total according to the date, so at any point Day 3 could be removed and instead replaced with Total if the date detects that we are only up to Day 2 , so we needn't display headers for Day 3 yet.

I wanted to use conditional formatting to style everything under Total a certain way, so I wrote this formula for the option Use a formula to determine which cells to format :

=IF(INDIRECT(CONCATENATE(CHAR(COLUMN()+64), 1)) = "Total", TRUE, FALSE)

This should be formatting any cell where the cell in its column's first row is equal to "Total". However, it simply never styles anything!

To troubleshoot, I attempted selecting just one column (ie C ) and applying a modified form of the rule just to that:

=IF(INDIRECT(CONCATENATE("C", 1)) = "Total", TRUE, FALSE)

... It worked! Then, I tried simply putting the first formula into a cell, and it was displaying TRUE and FALSE correctly. Everything seems to work, but for some reason that I could not figure out the conditional formatting would never apply.

Can someone please explain why?

PS in the question I wrote a simplified example, in the real thing I have 31 days instead of three, so it would be a major hassle to go through each column individually

Answer 1

INDIRECT(CONCATENATE(CHAR(COLUMN()+64), 1)) is probably the worst possible way I can think of to reference the cell in the first row and same column.

Instead of this:

INDIRECT(CONCATENATE(CHAR(COLUMN()+64), 1)) = "Total"

Try this (for example, for a conditional formatting rule in the A column, and apply the rule where ever else you need it):

A$1 = "Total"

These two formulas have the same effect.

Answer 2

OK... I solved this myself. Turns out that my formula was fully correct, but for some strange reason it didn't like the IF statement; I replaced it with:

INDIRECT(CONCATENATE(CHAR(COLUMN()+64), 1)) = "Total"

and it works fine!

However, I would still appreciate it if someone could explain why this happened (for future reference)