Eliminating blanks from conditional formatting in a range

Hi All, I have a problem which you may be able to help me with, the code below is part of a macro which sorts staff available on a given day in a roster, it is designed to ensure that I don't have someone on leave and on duty at he same time etc. However when I run the macro all blank cells in the range are identified as duplicates. Is there a way to eliminate blanks from the conditional formatting? Any suggestions would be welcome. Thanks in advance. Ed

Please Login or Register  to view this content.

Thanks TMS for your suggestion, however, while it eliminates the blank cells from formatting it also seems to remove conditional formatting from all other cells, e.g. it will not highlight two identical names Ed.

I've sorted a workaround by nominating the interior cell color tas o (no fill), so as there is no text in the blanks I can make duplicate text a different color and add strikethrough which is fine. Thanks for your time.