Detect the Conditional color of a cell - excel

Question

I'm doing a mail merge from Excel into Word, and I need to copy the background colors of some cells as well as the contents.
Here on SO I've learned that I could add a helper column, and insert a custom function (something like Selection.Interior.Color) that detects the code of the desired cell. I was going to have the mail merge stealthfully pass that code to Word, where a macro would see it and use it to colorize the corresponding table cell.
Unfortunately, Selection.Interior.Color only detects the natural, underlying color of the cell, not the conditionally-formatted color.
Is there a way to detect the color as assigned by the conditional formatting?
(There are 35 different columns using at least 8 different sets of conditional rules).
CONCLUSION: These solutions seem to work, but I decided to avoid adding data or macros to the Excel sheet. Instead I put a macro in Word that basically duplicates the Conditional Formatting functionality. It's slow, but I think its ultimately cleaner.
Thanks, everyone.

Answer 1

As #David said, it seems to be a pain. However, if the conditional formatting includes only the "traditional" standard excel colors (see here), the following seems to respond properly (not exhaustively tested). Column A (rows 1 to 12) contains values from 1 to 12, and conditional formatting were applied to those cells. The code below seems to work, as long as colors are "standard".
Sub Button1_Click()
For i = 1 To 12
Worksheets("Sheet1").Cells(i, 2) = Worksheets("Sheet1").Cells(i, 1).DisplayFormat.Interior.ColorIndex
Next
End Sub

Answer 2

Here is a routine which places the displayformat.interior.color code in a "helper column" next to the column being tested. I also added a column to show the RGB values, but only for interest. Oh, and the colors were all generated by conditional format.
Option Explicit
Sub GetColor()
Dim R As Range, C As Range
Set R = Range(Cells(2, 1), Cells(10, 1))
For Each C In R
C.Offset(0, 1).Value = C.DisplayFormat.Interior.Color
C.Offset(0, 2).Value = converttorgb(C.Offset(0, 1).Value)
Next C
End Sub
Function ConvertToRGB(lColor As Long) As String
Dim H As String
Dim Red As Integer, Green As Integer, Blue As Integer
H = Format(Hex(lColor), "######")
Red = Val("&H" & Right(H, 2))
Green = Val("&H" & Mid(H, 3, 2))
Blue = Val("&H" & Left(H, 2))
ConvertToRGB = Format(Red, "0\, ") & Format(Green, "0\, ") & Format(Blue, "0")
End Function
Depending on how you are transferring this information to Word, you may not even need to have it on the worksheet.