Find formatting doesn't work: "Excel cannot find data"

[Guest]

Can anyone tell me what things can prevent the Edit Menu>Find feature from
working?

I have an unprotected spreadsheet with a lot of formatting, including
conditional formatting. The data however consists of simple integers with
'general' number formats (the data isn't the product of formulas).

I need to do a find for say, the number 5 with blue font formatting. I have
cleared the Find format before putting blue font formatting in the Find
dialogue.

The Find works for cells with '5' in blue font in some relatively plain
cells, but it doesn't find cells with '5' in blue font which also have a lot
of other formats applied, such as larger fonts, conditional formatting, and
coloured borders.

It doesn't even find '5' in a cell when I have pasted the 'find format'
attributes from that very cell.

What could be preventing Excel from finding the data?

 

[Dave Peterson]

I think you'll find that the conditional formatting colors don't apply to the
edit|Find (or edit|replace) dialog.

And I had to have all the cell formatted with a blue font (not different
character by character font colors). But I could use character by character
bolding.

You do have the match entire cell contents set the way you want, right?