Microsoft Excel 2003 question - can I make text or a cell change colour with dates?

Count Duckula

Heya, sorry if this is in the wrong place. Also, I'm sorry for still using Excel 2003 but my boss is a tight b*****d and won't upgrade!

Essentially, I'm trying to draw up a new and combined form from a number of old forms we had dotted about the place, but also make some upgrades whilst I'm at it. The forms are vehicle and equipment information sheets and checklists. We're an electrical testing company, and each of our electricians is assigned a van, and each van is in turn assigned an equipment set. This spreadsheet is to keep track of everything and make sure it's still all in date and working safely and correctly so that we're not breaking any laws!

I can do most of the stuff involved (it's just a fair bit of work and then making it all pretty and non-breakable by the guys that'll be using it), but one of the main things I want to do is actually quite hard.

Our vans all have dates that their Service is due, their MoT is due (sorry, their NCT >_>) and so forth. I would LOVE a check in there somewhere that would look at the date that these things are due and compare it against the date that the form was filled in on (both those dates are entered manually). If it's overdue it would flag this up in red (something like "MoT OVERDUE") and add a comment in the "alert" section. If the date is within two months it would flag up that it was approaching, and perhaps the date ("MoT due by X/Y/Z") in yellow. If it was well within limits then it would neither flag anything up or add it to the comments section.

Sorry if that's a little complicated, and it may be beyond Excel's scope to do something like that. It's not absolutely vital, but it would make the form that little bit more useful, since we've found to our cost in this company recently that people can't be trusted to actually look at dates and work out themselves whether something is due or not - they'll just stare blankly at the screen until they get distracted by something else. If it's right there in red then they've no excuse!

Thanks for your time all.

Dacelonid

Conditional Formatting is what you are lloking for.
You can do something like if A3 > A2 then set color red for example

see example here

Count Duckula

You're a superstar!



**Edited because I figured my second problem out!**

Thanks for all your help