Managing Duplicate Conditional Formatting Rules in Excel 2007

This is a weird problem that some of you may have experienced. I went into a cell’s conditional formatting (Excel 2007) to do a minor change and I was astonished at the number of duplicate rules this cell had. For this cell there was an identical set of three rules duplicated 42 times!! It took me about 10 minutes to delete all but one of the sets.

The obvious question is HOW did I get so many duplicates? I use the “paint” facility to copy cell formats from one cell to another, and “paint” copies conditional format rules just like it copies other cell-formatting tools. (It puts the copied rules at the top of the list.) Does anyone know how to do a “paint” type format copy without copying the conditional formats too?

I subsequently went through many of the cells that have conditional formatting, and WOW!, it’s hard to believe how the rules accumulate if you don’t check the cell now and then. For those of you who don’t have 4 processors and 8GB memory, if you are running slow, you might find it beneficial to go through and check the rules on cells having conditional formatting and delete all the duplicates found. As I recall each condition executes a LOT of code.
Sid :motz2: