Any question answered...

So far, I've only been able to add three conditional formats.

There's one "toy town" code that blankets the whole range and says
1)if a cell is blank in this range and the date in CH3 is before the date this sheet was created, then colour it yellow.

2) if a cell is blank in this range and the date in CH3 is the same as the date this sheet was created, then colour it red.

then for individual column ranges within the sheet i do things so that I add a third rule.
so for instance
a cell in ck3 is red or yellow if blank, but if it contains the "wrong" text it goes pink.
therefore it has
1)if a cell is blank in this range and the date in CH3 is before the date this sheet was created, then colour it yellow.

2) if a cell is blank in this range and the date in CH3 is the same as the date this sheet was created, then colour it red.

3) if a cell IS NOT BLANK and DOES NOT CONTAIN "Brian" then colour it PINK

column b is the unique identifier for a record. the section of "kiddy code" strips out all formats and then says "look across this record, is there a blank in the data range? YES = RED"
then
"has it been more than a year since we looked at this record? YES = RED"

I'm not getting weird results in any cells other than B, where I'm trying to modify Q1 to say "well yes there's a blank in the range but you've told me that if AS3="Method C" then AT3 (to the right) can be blank so we can ignore that".

This covers what I want it to do. I export my data from a database, plonk it into excel. Apply the colour codes, then split it into separate sheets for a contributing group. Who receive an email showing them where the errors are. Because, otherwise, I'd be sat on my arse "contributing" more here.