Something I considered - could you do the entire table in Excel, where you can use conditional formatting? There's a pre-set condition that says "cell contains text" that would work even if your condition were "apple" and you had "applesauce" and "crabapple" options, or the like. The tricky part is getting a loooong Excel table into a Word document, if indeed it needs to go back to being a Word doc. You could insert an Excel sheet into Word, but getting it to paginate across multiple pages is not something I've been able to do neatly. But if you create it in Excel and "plain" paste it into Word, it becomes a table and in my quick experimenting, it does retain the cell background colors. I just had to make it fit and repeat the header row, etc.