Excel question - dates and conditional formatting

I keep a list of contracts in Excel and I would like Excel to tell me when a contract is within three months of expiring. I have all the contract end dates in there and I have used conditional formatting before, but I don’t know how to make it say “this date is less than or equal to three months from today’s date.” There must be a way for it to automatically highlight the end dates that are getting close?

Which version of excel are you using?

All I have is 2007 and its conditional formatting may be different than 2003.

In excel 2007 I was able to get conditional formatting to work by applying a formula of

< 90 + Now()

to the formatting formula for the cell .

Sometimes the process can mess up because Excel adds quotes before or after the expression when you initially set it up.

If that happen I usually try to remove the quotes via the edit button in “manage rules”

Sorry if this doesn’t apply to your Excel edition.

Thanks BubbaDog! That worked!

One thing I forgot to mention Now() is a Date/time function.

Probably not a problem if your contract dates are dates only (whole numbers in Excel date/ time )

But if you have a contract in there entered as a date time number (like 10/23/2008 02:00 PM) (possible if you used a formula to set it like = Now()+365) then the formating won’t change until tomorrow at 2 pm.

Glad it worked
Bubba