Conditional Formatting to Highlight lines that don't contain certain info

Hi there

I'm working on a way of highlighting rows to filter out info for certain properties. My Current doc lists the Property in column H with an Acronym, then the full property name. Right now, the only way I can think to do it is to make multiple rules, each highlighting the row for one acronym. My formula, for example, looks like this: =SEARCH("BZM - ",$H2)

I was wondering if there was a way to make a formula that highlights anything that does not start with the acronym BAC, CAC, ATL, etc… I only need about 13 acronyms to be accepted, but about 50 to be highlighted so I can filter them out. So it would be a lot better if I can do one formula saying "Look for anything that doesn't start with one of these…"

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Try

=ISERROR(LOOKUP(2^15,SEARCH($A$1:$A$13,$H2)))

A1:A13 is your list of Acronyms
There cannot be any blanks in that list.

It returns TRUE if none of the acronyms appear in H2, FALSE if any one or more of the acronyms DO appear in H2
You can change ISERROR to ISNUMBER if you want to reverse that logic.

It's NOT case sensitive, it wil find BZM just the same as bzm or Bzm
Change SEARCH to FIND if you want to make it case sensitive.

Also, I'd like to recommend NOT using conditional formatting to highlight values with the intention of Filtering them afterwards.

Instead, just put the formula in a cell and let it return True or False.
Then filter based on the True/False.

You can still conditional format based on the True/False of those cells.