Highlight cells that contains words only from a list

Solution 1:

If you want to highlight ba but not banana, you can add a delimiter before and after the keyword (and the string).

In your example, your words are separated by space, so I use that.

A formula would therefore be:

=OR(ISNUMBER(FIND(" "&Keywords&" "," " & $A1 & " ")))

Note that we also add the deliminator before and after the searched reference, so as to deal with keywords at the beginning/end of the string.

Also note that FIND is case-sensitive. For a case-insensitive formula, use SEARCH