I need to ditch the HTML tags and use Word's own formatting (italic, bold, etc).<BR><BR>I figured that it shouldn't be terribly complicated to parse the text in VBA, looking for tags and applying ...

Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) gives you an additional option for embedding images in Excel. When you add an image through the VBA window, you can embed it into an Excel dialog box.

With the next major update to Office for Mac, Microsoft will again give Mac users access to Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) scripting in Office documents.