How to apply conditional formatting (if cell is in another range) to a range of cells

Question

So I have searched through several different questions related to this. None of them seem to be asking exactly what I'm looking for and none of the solutions I've found have worked for me thus far.

• I have several columns of data (Player names) where each column's values are generated from a formula in the 2nd row of that column. The 1st row is a header (Game name). This whole range is the collection of which players are willing to play which games. These are columns DJ(ish, the list is dynamically generated with another formula, based on form responses)

• I have another range of data where the 1st column is the Player and the 2nd is the player's PREFERRED game. This data is also generated with a formula based on form responses. These are columns AB.

Here's what I'm trying to do

• Using conditional formatting in columns DJ, I want to highlight the player's name if this game (in row 1 of this column) is their preferred game (range A2:B).

I've tried several different variations of VLOOKUPS, MATCHES, and FILTERS in the conditional formatting, but so far nothing has worked. The problem I run into every time is that I can't figure out how to reference the cell that the formatting is applying to, but still have it reference each individual cell over the whole range.

I know I could do this if I applied an individual conditional formatting to each individual cell. However that is a very time consuming and inelegant solution to this issue considering I'm expecting my data range to be much larger in the future. I need a conditional formatting formula that will work across the whole range or , at the very least, for an entire column.

This is a mock of what I'm trying to accomplish:

This is a link to a mock of my sheet so that you can clearly see the data layout and specific formulas I'm using: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wy1T6dWJwNC_EfdCAbkuxtkJH7y4Cg3x4IyEk6R567M/edit?usp=sharing

Answer 1

use:

=REGEXMATCH(D3, TEXTJOIN("|", 1, FILTER($A$3:$A, $B$3:$B=D$2)))