Excel Conditional Formatting

[acesand8s]

I'm working on an Excel spreadsheet and have used conditional formatting to highlight cells I need to get rid of with the color red. My plan was then to use the Replace function to get rid of any cells that were colored red. The problem I have is that Excel is not reading those colors as red; it still sees them as the normal white color. Is there any way to either make Conditional Formatting the permanent, 'normal' format of a cell or to make the program read those cells as red? Any help would be greatly appreciated.