It has a bit but not completely.
This is not clear to me
Are the months a date (eg 1st of the month) formatted to just show the month or are they just Text?
-The months are text only in a merged cell.
Merged. I'm not understanding exactly what you have merged. It would seem to me to be unusual to have January merged over part of January and part of February. Can you give a couple of examples of exactly which cells are merged and exactly what values are in those merged cells?
-There are no values in the merged cells, only the text name of each month. I merged them to cover the reporting period and ease identification.
Example: ROW3 B3:AE3 are merged to appear as a header over the 30 day period (16JAN-15FEB) The dates in this example are abbreviated to "15" but would normally read "15-JAN-19"
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z AA AB AC AD AE
ROW 3: J A N U A R Y (No values, only merged text)
ROW 4: 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 (Individual dates formatted as "15-JAN-19)
If something is merged from January 16 to February 15, what is above January 1-15?
-My calendar begins at 16 January, which is the beginning of my reporting period
Your thread title mentions highlighting but your first post showed 'X's in the cells. Now you are talking about conditional formatting (highlighting) again. Can you confirm that it is just highlighting with conditional formatting that you want?
-Again, I apologize for the confusion. The "x" are there to illustrate the cells being highlighted. I only want the cells highlighted.
What version of Excel are you using?