Conditional Formatting Help

[Ria323]

I'm tracking minimum wages in the US. In the pic, AR4 cell is selected and is showing the conditional formatting. Although it is doing what I want it to do (highlight the cell orange if AQ4<>AR4, you can see the formula being shown is incorrect. It is showing P4<>Q4. Then it applies it to all these cells surrounded by green dashes. I do not want that. I want the conditional formatting to continue down the column so if AQ5<>AR5, cell is orange and so on. This would then we applied to the next column: for AS4 the formula should be if AR4<>AS4, color it orange and in this case it is correct with not being filled in.

How can make this formula work and be correct? No vba please as I do not know it. Thank you!!

 

[6StringJazzer]

In the pic, AR4 cell is selected

In the pic, AP20 is selected. This makes the rest of your explanation a bit difficult to follow.

The way conditional formatting works is that the formula is relative to the upper-left cell in the Applies To range. Your Applies To range is kind of a mess because it's discontiguous and we can't see it all, but it seems to start in column Q. It is also impossible to tell what rows are included.

You didn't explicitly say what you want except for a couple of examples. As near as I can figure, you want to highlight a cell if the amount in that cell is different than the amount in the preceding quarter. It seems that you want this applied to all quarters. I don't know how far to the right your data goes; we just see up to column BE.

The rule

=P4<>Q4

will work for all cells if the upper-left cell in Applies to is Q4. But columns P:AM are not even visible on your sheet so we can't tell what you intend.

Based solely on what is visible, change the formula to

=AN1<>AO1

And make the Applies To range $AO4:$BE999 where 999 is the last row of data.