[dhosek]

The functionality I want is a count-by-format function. I had to write my own in VBA and of course that means every time I open that sheet I have to approve its use of macros (and it also doesn’t always catch format changes that impact the calculation)

[auxym]

Encoding data in cell formatting is questionable practice.

[JadeNB]

> Encoding data in cell formatting is questionable practice.

"Let's force the user to employ data-management best practices" is, for better or for worse, very much not the design philosophy of Excel. (More to the point, if you must consume the data that someone else produces, then you'd like very much to be able to deal with their less-than-best practices.)

[function_seven]

Agreed, but I can’t control half the sheets I interact with.

Users really like to highlight rows, or use coloring to track their progress, or do some insane multi-color-mixed-with-other-formatting system to indicate complex statuses.

I’d like to be able to work with that terrible data.

[dhosek]

Why? Because the tools don’t provide nice ways to interact with it? I use colors and other formatting as ways of providing metadata to cells that I want to be able to move around in the spreadsheet.

[richardpetersen]

Can’t you achieve that with the new excel lambda function?