The shading can be turned off by selecting Options from the Tools menu and
then go to the View tab and uncheck the item there. However, if as you say
the shading appears with the merged data, this leads me to suspect very
strongly that you have not actually executed the merge, but are just
previewing the data in the mailmerge main document.

--
Please respond to the Newsgroup for the benefit of others who may be
interested. Questions sent directly to me will only be answered on a paid
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Hope this helps,
Doug Robbins - Word MVP
"dmjung" wrote in message
...
My merged fields are contained in cells within various tables. The main
document shows the fields with a shaded background and the merged data
also
has the shaded background. The cells are configured to not have a shaded
background. How do I get rid (or reduce) the shaded background?

--David