Conditional formatting should be a tool that works for you, not a puzzle you have to solve with brute-force trial and error. The user here has done the hard part, they built a tracking sheet, set up statuses, and got the delivery dates highlighting the way they wanted. Now they are stuck on what should be a simple logical step: when a status flips to "complete," the urgency formatting should vanish. That is not a niche ask. That is a core behavior for any healthy workflow. If a completed task still screams for attention, your sheet is lying to you, and no amount of clever IF formulas will fix that if you are not thinking about the order in which those rules are evaluated.
The practical answer here is not more complex formulas. It is understanding how conditional formatting stacks and prioritizes. When you apply a rule to a range, the first rule that returns "true" wins, unless you check the "Stop If True" box. The user is likely running into a conflict where the delivery date rule fires first, so the status rule never gets a chance to override it. The fix is to add a new rule that checks if the status cell equals "complete," applies no fill and no strikethrough, and then make sure that rule is at the top of the list with "Stop If True" enabled. That is it. No nested IFs, no array formulas, just a clean, direct condition that says "if this is done, drop the formatting." It is the kind of solution that feels obvious in hindsight, but only after someone explains why the obvious approach did not work.
What this means for anyone reading is that your spreadsheet is not a static document. It is a living system, and conditional formatting is its way of reacting to change. If you are building a tracker, you should not be manually clearing highlights or deleting colors every time you mark something complete. That is not productivity; that is data entry in disguise. The tool is capable of doing that for you, but only if you treat the formatting rules as part of the logic, not as decoration. The user asking the question is on the right track. They are not failing at spreadsheets; they are hitting the edge of what trial-and-error teaches, and that is exactly where a clear explanation helps more than another formula guess.
So here is the concrete takeaway: stop fighting the IF formulas and start looking at rule order. Your status column is the driver. Use it to suppress the delivery formatting the moment it flips to "complete." Put that rule first, check "Stop If True," and your sheet will finally behave the way you expected it to from the beginning. That is not a workaround. That is just how the tool is meant to be used.