Good evening Howie

You've almost answered your own question here:

"my printer insists on printing these cells in black - as if the font is not set as white at all."

Conditional formatting just makes your cells "look" a different colour to you - to the computer there is no difference. If you manually set your text to white on white, then XL will recognise it as such, but no so with conditional formatting.

Additionally, if you try using a macro to determine the colour of a conditionally formatted cell, it will not return the colour index of the colour that YOU see.

Kind of difficult to explain, but hope that settles it.

HTH

DominicB