making conditional formatting not continuous

[zachg]

I applied conditional formatting to detect duplicates in a spreadsheet with 12,000 entries. Being a novice, I did not realize that conditional formatting is applied continuously. In otherwords, it doesn't just format them once, but stays as a condition with the document, where removing it removes the formats.

The problem is that this slows down Excel to a crawl, making it very difficult to further work with the document. Is there anyway to remove the condition, while preserving the formatting? Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Zach

[oldchippy]

Just thinking, did you apply CF to the whole spreadsheet (every single cell) or just the 12,000 cells, if you did that could slow it down.

[zachg]

Nearly the entire spreadsheet; there were 8 rows at the beginning that had supplementary information and column titles that I didn't select.

What about exporting to a different format like Word or html? Would that preserve the formatting?

[oldchippy]

Give it a try and see, back up your data first.

[zachg]

When I try to export to html, the resulting file shows up blank and Excel freezes. Is this just because its running so slow or is there another reason it won't work?