>In my VFP medical system I have a patient record with name/address etc. I would like to have a number of standard letters in Word which I can maill merge the patients details to.....can this be done from within the VFP application? Does Word need to be running in the background?

Hi Bob, there are a number of ways to do this. Mainly, you need to start by outputting the data you want to merge into an acceptable format. This is practically any format aside from the VFP dbf file. Even a Foxpro 2.6 type file will work. Once you've done that, then just create a word merge document based on that source. From then on, you can just recreate the source file with new data and run the word program. To run it from inside an application - just use the getobject() function to active microsoft's ole. Like this:MDOCFILE = GETOBJECT('C:\WRDPROC\MYDOC.DOC','WrdProc.Document')

mydoc.doc being the word mailmerge document you created.