Just some information on your reference to the "real" format of the cell.

Excel maintains two formats for a cell that has conditional formatting. The first is the format of the cell as if no conditional formatting were applied. The second is the format to be overlaid on the first format if the condition is met. I'd suspect that your code is returning the first format. Is that the case? I don't know how the second format is accessed in VBA.

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John.