Carrying Excel cell properties into word when mail merging

[RIPage]

I have an excel document with some cells that contain colour others which
contain background shading. I would like to be able to create a mail merge
document in word that picks up the data from this excel file and carries with
it all the cell information i.e. font size, font colour, font type,background
colour etc as well as the cell value, and places all of that information into
word. It appears as though you only get the cell value.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

You can get at least some of the text attributes (font, fontsize) through
using a trick:
a. edit|copy your sheet and edit|paste special into a blank Word document
using a format that retains the properties (probably Formatted RTF).
b. Instead of using { MERGEFIELD myfield } in your mail merge main
document, use { REF myfield } or just { myfield } if there is no clash with
the name of a field type.

However, to retrieve the cell formatting as well I think you would have to
consider generating your Word document using automation (e.g. using Excel
VBA) rather than using MailMerge, and even then you would probably only be
able to get cell backgrounds by using table cells, or perhaps converting the
cells to images or text boxes. Not something I'd want to try to get right


Peter Jamieson