Hello,
I'm new to this forum and a newbie at Excel and I'm hoping I'm posting this message in the right place on this forum.
I'm in the process of making an annual staff leave tracker in hours, in Excel. At this point, now after several hours of searching and trying I have carefully and step by step put together a range that looks like a table, (but NOT formatted as such e.g. via "Ctrl+T"), that has horizontally across the top the dates of the whole year (2020) and vertically on the left side a list of the employees ( 20 in total). In the field between these axes, I would like to input a letter and a number, where the letter would change the colour of the cell and the number would refer to the number in hours, to be added later, or to rephrase:

1. I click on the required cell in the range ( coordinates: employee name, date)
2. I enter a letter: "a" for annual leave, "s" for sick leave and "i" for any other leave. Ideally, at this point, I would like the colour of the selected cell to change in line with the colour I have assigned through conditional formatting ( or any other way, suggestions welcome), to the letter ( "a", "s", or"i") being used.
3. I enter a number (in the same cell), to display the number of hours involved. This number will be used to calculate to the total number of hours leave taken or due for that employee.

I'm beginning to wonder now if this is at all possible?

Apologies for the long story, but I would be grateful if you could help in any way.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Regards