anyone good at excell?

Glad to hear you worked around it, the way to have fixed it in your formula was to use IFERROR in your formula

IFERROR((D20-A21-A22-A23-A24-A25-A26-A27-A28-A29-A30-A31),””)

ill try that, just for fun

IIRC you can use the Format Painter to copy the Conditional Formatting to other cells after you've done it once.

that would have been nice to know, but each cell has a unique formula anyway