I've been puzzling over your problem for a couple of days, and I haven't really come up with a solution.
I suspect that you will need some sort of Visual Basic Macro. Something which changes the properties of the cell when it is active, or highlighted. But I'm not a VB man myself.
Microsoft have very good newsgroup site, (browser based), here where you can search for people who had similar questions, or post a question yourself.
Or perhaps swisse, on these forums may pick this up and give you advice. He's a wiz on VB programming.
I have found a method that might work for you, but it's a workaround, and may need careful tweaking and positioning to get it to look right and work well.
It uses Conditional Formatting, (Format > Conditional Formatting).
You can format any cell's properties to change when a condition is met. So, if you set a cell (or group of cells), to point to a target cell, (note, I don't mean the contents of the cells, just the conditional formatting), and format the cell or cells to change background color if the contents of the target cell equals that of the formatted cells, then the color of the formatted cells wil, change.
Example
Cell A1 is the target cell. In this cell you type in the value or expression you want to search for, instead of using the Find function.
Cells B1 to B5 hold the following values;
B1=20
B2=30
B3=Fred
B4=empty
B5="Mary"
Then highlight cells B1 to B5, goto Conditional Formatting, and select Condition 1 "Cell Value is", "equal to", =$A$1, then click the Format button to select how you want the property of the cells to change
You can select Condition 2, (click the "Add" button), to reset the formatting if the target cell is blank, (although it isn't necessary).
In this way, you can use cell A1, (or whatever cell you want), as your Find function, and conditionally format "all" the cells that you need to be highlighted if the contents of A1 matches any of the other cells.
I have just tried a little demonstration and it works, but this may not be what you want.
Let me know if this helps in any way.
Mark
Win XP Pro; Office 2000 (Premium)
I've cussed at this pet peeve for three years.
When using Ctrl-F to find a word or phrase in a worksheet, Excel jumps to the first result but it doesn't highlight it like Word does. Excel just makes the active cell's border fatter, which is no bloody help at all because it's barely noticable.
Is there a way I can change the way Excel displays an active cell? I'd like it to highlight the whole cell with some colour or other or even just black with white font or something. I tried changing the Windows Display properties in Control Panel but that didn't work.
So-o-o...with fingers crossed, I say thanks in advance for any help.
(OhPlease...OhPlease...OhPlease...)

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