Writing Formulas in Excel

I am doing a client progress sheet and I want to create conditional formatting so that all cells that are not showing progress (either equal to or greater than the cell above it) is shown in red font.

I know how to create conditional formatting with a simple rule, but I can't seem to come up with the rule I need for this....

Thank you for any help you may be able to give me....

PS its the cell reference I need help with most...I understand that I can use greater than or equal to signs, etc...I can't go through and reference each cell, I need to be able to use the formula throughout the document so that as more information is added, it can keep on calculating and formatting automatically.....

 

.........or what I'd really love to do is highlight all cells that have a difference greater than 5 from the cell above

 

I can make it say lots of things but not make it red. The easiest one I can do is make a column next to it with an IF/THEN statement that is blank for those that progress and has a word for those that don't or aren't more than 5 higher. Would that work?

 

I've thought about this but can't see a way to do it via Conditional Formatting. So, I'd have to take a more manual approach and use a column next to the primary column and use a formula in it to display a 0 or 1 depending on whether the difference was greater than 5. So, a small section of such a spreadsheet would look like the attachment.

Then, I'd sort the columns based on the column with 0 or 1 to get all 1's grouped together and then highlight the corresponding cells in the primary column in red. Once that's done, they rows could be sorted back to the original order; oh, wait, another column column would be needed to simply set up row numbers so that they can be re-sorted back to the original order unless some other column such as date already exists which could be used for this purpose.

 

Thanks so much ! Your ideas gave me lots to work with....I can use an adjacent column and then i found an icon conditional formatting that works well...thanks again !!!