Home/ Questions/Q 8164491
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-06T19:19:44+00:00

I’m new to StackOverflow and VBA. I am an Expert with all aspects of

  • 0

I’m new to StackOverflow and VBA. I am an Expert with all aspects of Excel except writing code in VBA from scratch.

What I am trying to do is apply an color from the index to the interior of a cell if it contains a specific term. Here is what I have:

Sub ConditionalFormatting()

Do Until ActiveCell = ""

If ActiveCell = "STAR DISTRICT" Then
ActiveCell.Interior.ColorIndex = 50
ElseIf ActiveCell = "STAR SCHOOL" Then
ActiveCell.Interior.ColorIndex = 50
ElseIf ActiveCell = "HIGH PERFORMING" Then
ActiveCell.Interior.ColorIndex = 43
ElseIf ActiveCell = "SUCCESSFUL" Then
ActiveCell.Interior.ColorIndex = 34
ElseIf ActiveCell = "ACADEMIC WATCH" Then
ActiveCell.Interior.ColorIndex = 38
ElseIf ActiveCell = "LOW PERFORMING" Then
ActiveCell.Interior.ColorIndex = 22
ElseIf ActiveCell = "AT RISK OF FAILING" Then
ActiveCell.Interior.ColorIndex = 18
ElseIf ActiveCell = "FAILING" Then
ActiveCell.Interior.ColorIndex = 3
Else: ActiveCell.Interior.ColorIndex = 1
End If

ActiveCell.Offset(1, 0).Select

Loop

End Sub

The options are:
Star District or School,
High Performing,
Successful,
Academic Watch,
Low Performing,
At Risk of Failing,
Failing

This code works for one column (except for the bottom two terms) but it will not work anywhere else in the worksheet. When I try it anywhere else, all of the Cells turn Black (or ColorIndex = 1) no matter what the cell contains.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Trenton

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Without seeing your input data in your Excel spreadsheet, it is hard to say exactly why this is true:

    This code works for one column (except for the bottom two terms) but it will not work anywhere else in the worksheet. When I try it anywhere else, all of the Cells turn Black (or ColorIndex = 1) no matter what the cell contains.

    However, String comparison by default in VBA is a binary comparison, meaning it will be case sensitive and you are comparing ActiveCell to various upper case strings. If your Excel Spreadsheet contains anything but all upper case, all of the tests will fail.

    You need to do one of 2 things. First, you can add Option Compare Text to the top of your code sheet. That will change all comparisons to Text instead of Binary comparisons.

    Or you can wrap each ActiveCell in a UCASE function, that will capitalize any value in the active cell before performing the comparison:

    If UCase(ActiveCell) = "STAR DISTRICT" Then
...
ElseIf UCase(ActiveCell) = "STAR SCHOOL" Then
...
...
...
End If

    EDIT:

    As you mentioned in your comments, the problem was trailing spaces in the cell values, the appropriate code fix is to wrap ActiveCell in a Trim function. And you can nest functions inside of each other like:

    If UCase(Trim(ActiveCell)) = "STAR DISTRICT" Then
...
ElseIf UCase(Trim(ActiveCell)) = "STAR SCHOOL" Then
...
...
...
End If

    This would trim any trailing and leading spaces from the value in ActiveCell then make it upper case to compare to your flagged value.

    • 0