Excel Reports - Preserve Template Format

Question

Two part question here:
Part 1:
Is there an easy way to use the NI Report Generation Toolkit or any of the Excel subvis in the _Office addons subdirectory to preserve the existing formatting of a cell that you are writing data to? For example, I have a report template with named ranges to which I write data using the Excel Easy Text.vi, but that VI has inputs for cell formatting (font) that, when left blank, default to some font that I don't necessarily want. Is there a way to get the font (and other formatting properties--allignment, merge status, etc.) from the template before writing data to it to avoid overriding the template settings? I have searched through all the NI Report libraries and the Office addons, and I can't seem to find anything that will accomplish this.
Which brings be to Part 2:
Naturally, my reaction to the problem above is simple: roll your own. I figured it would be pretty easy to write a subvi to return the font refnum from a named range; it would probably look something like this:
However, as you can see, I get broken wires on my attempt to unbundle from the private Report class object. Apparently, I can't access properties of this object unless my VI is a part of the library, but I can't add my VI to the library because it is protected. Is there any way around this? I can see NI not wanting me to go in a modify the shipping vi.lib VIs, but it seems like it's not too much to ask for the ability to add user-created VIs to the libraries.
Maybe there's an easier way; I admit I'm pretty new to LVOOP.
EDIT: Oh, I did see that I could use the Excel Get ActiveX References to return refnums from the original report object, but that seems a bit messy for my tastes--too many unneeded references that I would have to close afterwards, and the connector pane leaves much to be desired (couldn't all the references be bundled together?).

Answer 1

...but I see your String/Numeric data inputs and raise you Array data!
I have some data sets that I store in a 2D string array that I dump to a named range in my Excel template. It works fine if I use the Excel Easy Table.vi, but there is still the aforementioned formatting concern. I tried handling it like this:
But it doesn't seem to preserve all the formatting, for some reason (i.e. correct font type [bold], but incorrect font size). It sure would be nice if I could add a new subvi to the Find and Replace polymorphic VI to handle string/numeric arrays...