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I realize that generally speaking I'm quite a bit of a newb, but here's what I'm trying to do: I have a sheet in Excel with all the details of the participants in a conference I'm organising. I want to send them all a letter with their personal programme.

Using MailMerge (MS Office 2003), I can easily import their address-info into a batch of word-documents. What I can also do without too much trouble is pull the data concerning their personalized programme into the document.

What I would like to do however, is to format cells in a table based on the value of certain columns in my sheet. To be more precise, I am placing the names of the programme-items participants have signed up for in seperate cells in a table, and I would like the background color of these cells to be changed according to the name of the programme-item that is contained by this cell. So for example all cells with a programme item that contains the word "great hall" should be colored red.

I can't seem to find a way to do this using the standard features of MailMerge, and as far as I know conditional formatting (which would otherwise be perfect) doesn't work within Word. Do I have to use Word VBA macro's or something of the sort? They seem complicated.

Thanks in advance for anyone's time/answer!