Windows 7: [Office 2010]Unable to Fill Conditional format down the entire Column

Hi everyone

I have a sheet which has 3 dates - Invoice, Po and Recieved. Invoice date must not be before PO date (can be same) and also Invoice date must not be after Recieved date (can be same). Lets assume Invoice date column is A, PO date column is B and RT date column is C

I have applied the following conditions

=A2<B2 (highlight cell in red) - for invoice being before PO
=A2>C2 (highlight cell in red) - for invoice being after recieved
=A2="" (no highlight) - If I don't give this condition, cell always remains highlighted.

The formatting works fine, but I'm unable to fill this conditional formatting down the entire column (column A) when I attempt to do this, the conditions are always being referenced to the original cell - Also, I'm not using absolute references (using $ sign) - I tried to copy the first cell and then paste special formats down the entrie column, but it didn't work - Tried the format painter as well but to no avail - the one thing I found working was double clicking the format painter and clicking on each cell individually - this results in correct formulas, but this is tedious for me as there are more than 1000 rows in my sheet.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! I'm attaching a sample sheet for reference - please rename it to .xls for viewing, I'm unable to upload xls file.