Excel may apply conditional formatting only to the first character or to the first few characters of a string instead of to all the characters of a string

You set conditional formatting for a string in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. However, Excel may apply the conditional formatting only to the first character or to the first few characters of the string instead of to all the characters of the string. For example, you want the word "Late" to appear in red when a task is past its due date. However, when that condition is met, only the letter "L" appears in red. The letters "ate" do not appear in red.

This behavior may occur if the string has more than one font style. For example, the first character or the first few characters of the string have a font size of 14. The other characters of the string have a font size of 10. Excel will apply the conditional formatting to only the first font style. The style to which Excel applies the conditional formatting is always the style that is used for the first character or for the first few characters of the string.

This behavior is by design.