Conditional Formatting

Thanks for responding so quickly.  Your answer to my second question is what I thought I would have to do.  I'll have to give that one more thought.

On the first question, to ensure I understand what you are saying, I have two rules.  One rule results in changing the color of a cell to one color (essentially if the first cell in a row has any value then the cell color of another cell turns, say, blue).  The other results in changing the color of a cell to a different color, red.  The second rule would only be true under more restricted conditions.  So...the first rule turns the cell color blue when a user puts a value in the first cell of the row and only if the second rule happens to be true will that cell then change to red.  Tested independently both rules work.  I "thought" that if I change the order in which the rules executed (Manage Rules then move the second rule for execution after the first rule) but it seems that this doesn't work and honestly, not having to worry about rules that compete with one another, I didn't know if this would work.  The second rule returns false based on testing some dates in the worksheet such as if today's date is after a date indicated as a header above a series of columns and the cell has no value then the cell turns red.  So the notion was the first rule would execute and turn the cell blue as soon as a value is put in the cell in column A.  Then if the second condition returns true, the cell would turn red.  What I think may be happening is once the first rule changes the cell color to blue, the second rule can't seem to turn the blue cell red.  The reason I think this may be the case is because if I leave the first rule active (removing the second), the cell turns blue after I enter something in column A, and I then manually change the format of the cell to change the color to red, the color will not change to red.  Is there a way to get around this?