Within the Office forums, it has been suggested I put my queston to this group. In a table in Word, when text is entered or changed, I need it to flash for five minutes, then return to normal. Any suggestions please ?

For the effect you can use the "Blinking Background" special effect; that will really simplify the task.

Windows has an API that will run a function after a set amount of time. This API has an argument that is the address of the routine to run at the timeout point. That's an easy task for C, a bit harder for VB.

But fortunately, VB now has the AddressOf operator, which allows passing a function address to the Windows API.

So write a routine that searches for any text that has the special effect for a blinking background, and that sets that feature off when found. Let's say it is ClearBlink().

If this text is being added through programming, then the last line of the code could be to call that windows API with "AddressOf ClearBlink" as one of the arguments.

Maybe if you could post a narrative of what transpires I could be more specific.

Brian,
thank you for your reply, I'm aware of the text effects in Word but I fear I'm out of my depth here! I have no experiance of writing and was hoping that there might be a simple macro, thanks anyway.