


'F13') is also not particularly logical, the cell you have to put in here depends on how you dragged out the selection on the cells before selecting 'conditional formatting'. So to match the word 'yes' anywhere in a cell's text content, you could use: The open office help says that COUNTIF uses regular expressions for matching the text - hence the '.*' before and after the 'P' (when looking for cells that only contain an exact phrase match i've had mixed success with a straight "P" test - it seems to work in conditional formatting formulas, but not in cells). This tests for the character 'P' anywhere in the text of each cell in turn. I'm sure there must be an easier way, but here's what I came up with to test a cell to see if it contains a text string value in conditional formatting:
