Is it possible to do a count by colour of text? Say for example in 1 column i have green, red and purple text count i count the occurances of each colour?
Is there a way i can return a true or false value from coloured text? i am not using numbers so am struggling

No. Rather than using colours, you would be better off adding a new column & populating it with values.

Not sure in Excel itself, but you can certianly write a macro along the line of

cells(1,2).value = Cells(1, 1).Interior.ColorIndex

this will give a numberical value of the colour of cell (1,1) so you can go through and find all cells in a range that have that colour

The link below has a VBA soution - creating a user defined function...

Function CountColor(rColor As Range, rSumRange As Range)

''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
'Written by Ozgrid Business Applications
'www.ozgrid.com

'Counts cells based on a specified fill color.
'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
Dim rCell As Range
Dim iCol As Integer
Dim vResult

iCol = rColor.Interior.ColorIndex

For Each rCell In rSumRange
If rCell.Interior.ColorIndex = iCol Then
vResult = vResult + 1
End If
Next rCell

CountColor = vResult
End Function

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To use these UDF's push Alt+F11 and go Insert>Module and paste in the code. Push Alt+Q and save. The Function will appear under "User Defined" in the Paste Function (Shift+F3).