Conditional Formatting - a column

As you mentioned you can use Conditional Formatting to look for specific text and format accordingly. As for getting messed up over time, excel tries hard but inserts, deletes, moves and such can mess up the conditional formatting range. As for alternative options, your only other choice for automatically changing formatting is to use a macro. Maybe instead look at what you are doing in the sheet (inserting/deleting/moving) and see if you could rearrange or reformat the sheet to avoid that. Maybe if you format the range as a table that could help. Or maybe if you have an 'input' sheet and then another sheet that formats and displays the data. In fact if you have an input sheet you can add a 'delete' column and enter a date that value was 'removed' and your output sheet wouldn't show it any more but you input sheet would even capture historical tracking information. Since I have no idea what your actual sheet is it is hard to say what might be best in your case.