Apply formatting to the WHOLE row/column if ANY of the cells fulfils condition

Question

Conditional formatting, even when applied to the whole row/column, treats each cell individually and applies formatting only to the cells that meet criteria.

Example:
An attempt to highlight whole row 7 if any of the cells is not blank:

Result: As mentioned above, highlights only specific cells, not the whole row.

If only there was a range-aware version of the isblank() function, that would operate on a range of cells instead of treating each cell individually. Like so: =not(isblank(row(A7:7))) - This works not as desired, i.e. it evaluates row(A7:7) as an integer literal 7, and, since 7 is not blank, the whole expression evaluates to TRUE, regardless of the contents of the cells.

Is it possible to achieve this range-aware formatting on formula level, i.e. without a custom script?

(Yeah, yeah, I'm aware that a custom script for that is not that time-consuming to write, but more people might be facing the same problem, so a more user-friendly solution is welcome.)

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Update 6/14/2018:

Formatting in google sheets seems to be buggy and/or poor-documented. That might be the reason why @Ceu Melo's solution works for me even with numbers, despite @Rubén claiming otherwise:

Bugginess demonstration:

An attempt to highlight whole row if a condition holds true for a specific cell (B2) in that row:

No better if B2 is changed to C2 in the condition:

On a real-world document it looks equally terrible:

Changing data format didn't seem to affect formatting behaviour at all.
In the screenshots it's set to "Automatic".

Answer 1

Try the function COUNTA, it counts the number of cells in a range that are not empty,

and indicate more than zero for conditional rule:

Was this what you were looking for?

Answer 2

For area A1:E500 using a custom forumula:

=if($B1="Purchased",1)

Will highlight the entire row if Purchased is in the B column. The key point is locking the check to the B column with the $.

Answer 3

Is it possible to achieve this range-aware formatting on formula level, i.e. without a custom script?

Short answer

Yes, it's possible.

Instructions

For the "Apply to range" setting use

7:7

Considering that

• 0 values are parsed as FALSE
• Other numbers are parsed as TRUE

for the "Custom formula" setting use

=COUNT(7:7)+COUNTA(7:7)

• COUNT counts cells having numbers
• COUNTA counts cells having texts, even ""

Or

=COLUMNS(7:7)-COUNTBLANK(7:7)

• COLUMNS return the number of columns
• COUNTBLANK return the number of blanks

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NOTES

June 14, 2018

After a comment from the OP and reading today's question update, I tested the solution proposed by Ceu Melo and today it worked for numbers too, despite that COUNTA is supposed to count only cells that have text, not numbers.

Answer 4

=counta(7:7)>0

Worked for me in conditional formatting for a range of 30 rows x 3 columns.