mail merge subject to colour of cells

**screamh** · 08-03-2010, 06:21 AM

All, please excuse me if I have posted in the wrong forum. Am at my wits end.....

I want to do a mail merge into MS Word. The speadsheet I am using has many coloured cells (green) to indicate changes between earlier and upated info.

My questions -

(1) is there any way to perform a mail merge on the info contained only in the coloured cells?

or

(2) is there any way that merged info in the document will be formatted differently (italics, or coloured, or...) to indicate that the data has come from a coloured cell in Excel?

Many thanks, c.

**Cheeky Charlie** · 08-03-2010, 08:05 AM

colours are a very poor way of adding information to cells (sorry)

I'm not sure what you mean by your first suggestion, would you have gaps, or do you have whole rows at a time green?

If you add a column alongside your data and put an 'x' in each row you want to use, you can then filter by the 'x's and extract those data for your mailmerge

To be more precise we'd need to see an uploaded workbook

**teylyn** · 08-03-2010, 08:13 AM

Color is not data. Use a distinct column to indicate the status of each row. Color coding is a very bad practice to convey meaningful information for processing further down the line.

If you want to see color in your sheet, use conditional formatting based on the entries in the status column. Hide the status column, if you must, but store the status as something other than color applied to a cell.