By default, Excel will keep the text value background. A key difference with the Data Bar format is it shows on all cells as opposed to ones that meet a specific condition.Click the ‘Format’ button next to the large ‘No Format Set’ box and select the fill color for the cell. By default, this will keep empty cells free of all formatting however if you need the blank cells to be highlighted as well, you can give it a format when you create the rule.The text format works if you format first and type your numbers in, but we were not doing that, we needed to copy and paste numbers from another program into Excel.
