in Google Sheets I'd like to format an area of cells automatically by comparing its date value to another cell. In fact, I have some cells representing a month (the area of cells to be formatted) and a single cell with another date (05.05.2022 formatted as 05.05. see screenshot).

So date for homework is located in U6 and cell area for moth of may is K11:Q16. When I set conditional formatting to

apply to range: K11:Q16

and

Date is: exact date: =U6 or custom formula is: =U6

it does not work. But when I set range to N12 (05.05.2022 formatted as 5) it does work.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

edit: I created a separate sheet for sharing, so this does not fit to the screenshot: