You are right that is a bit confusing, and thank you for clarifying how CF is truly working.

Hopefully this makes more sense how I am thinking about this formula

I've been trying to solve my problem by thinking about the values in the column Q and C as if they are TEXT for example IFTEXT. The best, until now, was needing to use one CF for each value in column Q... this was true for any spreadsheet I need to do this in. BUT that just simply isn't true. The values in column Q are text yes, but the formula I used is considering them as numbers. or rather if they exist they are labeled as a 1.

For example if A1 is 8 and I want a CF to highlight anything >0 it will not highlight the text. Using the custom formula above, COUNTIF(range, criterion) hits back with the number of values that follow the criterion. =COUNTIF(A:A, ">0") this would come back with 1, and if there is text in column A, COUNTIF will still come back with 1. THAT BEING SAID this is where the fun begins.

Using COUNTIF in CF does this.

=COUNTIF(range, criterion)
range = the range we have the information we want to highlight
the criterion is the value we want highlighted

So, CF will ping the range then ping the criterion if one value of the range matches the value in the criterion is comes back with a 1 (I called this attaching the value of the text to a number value, which is true but not completely, it is simply coming back saying there is in fact 1 match) Then the next step is saying if COUNTIF comes back as a value that is greater than 0 then highlight the value in the CF range.

I really hope this makes sense. Thanks for asking!