Conditional Format question

[Desu Nota from Columbus]

Excel 2003:

For the range of cells I17:L22, I have the following formula applied to each cell:

I17= "=IF(OR(I8="", H8=""),"",(I8-H8)/I8)"
I18= "=IF(OR(I9="", H9=""),"",(I9-H9)/I9)"
J17= "=IF(OR(J8="", I8=""),"",(J8-I8)/J8)"
J18= "=IF(OR(J9="", I9=""),"",(J9-I9)/J9)"
ETC....

I have following conditional formatting rules:

1) =I17>0 Green Background
2) =I17<0 Red Background
3) =OR(I17=0, I17="") White Background (Don't Change)


Currently all "blank" cells are turning Green, I put blank in quotation marks because each cell contains the formula listed above which I believe causes excel to see them as not blank.

How do I change my formatting or formula to fix this problem?

There is a necessary differentiation between Blank and Zero so I can't change my formula to turn blank cells to 0's.

 

[Jonmo1]

Try changing
=I17>0
to
=AND(I17>0,LEN(I17)>0)

 

[Desu Nota from Columbus]

I finally got it. I've dickered with this for almost 30 minutes.

I changed the conditional formatting to

=ISNUMBER(I17)*(I17>0)

=ISNUMBER(I17)*(I17<0)

=ISNUMBER(I17)*(I17=0)

Thanks for the answer (yours worked as well--i forgot to refresh the page when I looked to see if anyone replied)