How is it that you want it to work? If you were doing conditional formatting, you'd still be applying a format, albeit a conditional one, to a bunch of cells that you'd selected.

Well, I suppose you could use the STYLE() function, but you still have to enter that in a cell, and there's no way to loop using Excel functions, so you're still talking about using a cell to run a single function, or, at most, a finite number of them.

Seriously, though, how are you wanting it to work? Pretend that you can just make up Excel functions and show us what you want to write.