"Conditional formatting" via VB?

I created a workbook which uses about 3000 cells that have
conditional formatting.

Basically, the cell uses a dropdown and if "A" is chosen,
the cell turns orange, "B" makes it green, "C" makes it
blue. Problem is that when I go to save it, I receive the
message that "Excel could not save all the data and
formatting you recently added to filename.xls" because
excel will not save files with conditional formatting more
than 2050 rows.

So I'm trying to come up with another way to do this. Is
there a visual basic trick to doing so? Unfortunately, I
am not that skilled at vb...

Thanks.