Hi =?Utf-8?B?SnVzdGlu?=,

Is the procedure you supplied for Word 2002 or for 2003? The reason I ask is that
we've heard (but haven't been able to confirm) that Word 2003 can pull the
conditionally formatted data directly from Excel. We don't currently have access to
a copy of Word 2003 to test this and would like to confirm whether or not it can do
this prior to purchasing Word 2003.

If this is true it would be big news to me. I don't see how it is possible, though,
using mail merge. The default data connection for both 2002 and 2003 is OLEDB, and
that, like an ODBC connection, links only to the data tables. DDE, the old
technology, never brought across any formatting except that applied to table content
(date, numbers, etc.).

In the hopes you had discovered something, I just tested, and I sure don't see any
conditional cell formatting come across.

Hmmm. 73 fields is so close to the "legal" number...

What I could imagine could work would be to use LINK field to bring in those "stray"
10 columns of information, although this could get tricky if there are lots of
records. LINK fields connect to the source application via OLE, which means there
could be quite a bit of overhead involved. But LINK fields do bring across
formatting.

The basic approach looks like this

{ LINK Excel.Sheet.8 "C:\\Documents and Settings\\User\\My Documents\\SalesData.xls"
"Sheet1!R{ = { MergeSeq } + 1 }C3" \a \f 4 \r }

What you're doing is telling it you want the cell at a particular row and column
intersection. The column stays the same for each record; the row index changes
(increments by one) for each record. MergeSeq does this for you, but I add 1 to it
to allow for the field names row in the Excel file.

Using this technique, you MUST merge to a new document, then Ctrl+A, F9 to force the
fields to update. At this point, you could then press Ctrl+Shift+F9 to turn the
linked information into plain, Word text (thus getting rid of the overhead, and any
danger the information could change).

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Sep 30 2003)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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