>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?

You need to consider which version of Word the user will have installed. Word for Office 95 uses "Word Basic" (a macro language) and Word for Office 97 uses VBA. loMSWord = createobject("word.basic") vs. createobject("word.application"). The document formats are also different (I'm sure you recall the hubbub).

Also, if you are doing a great number of merges you should be careful of the data type that you choose. Everything, except for a word table, goes through ODBC and is extremely slow.

We run a direct mail shop that prints letters from Fox tables that could be as large as 30K records. We print them in 250 piece bundles. If we were to open that 30K record table through ODBC and try to print pieces 10000-10250 we'd be sitting and waiting for a while. Our printers can produce 30 pieces per minute so we had to beat that. Our solution was to produce them one at a time instead of all at once (250 one page print jobs vs. one 250 page print job). That allowed us to stop the job in the middle if necessary.

Word tables are the fastest data type that a mail merge letter can handle. You could code the system to open your DOC, create a blank document, create the table with one blank row, attach the table to your letter, fill in the first row of the table, merge the letter, fill in the first row...

It's really very easy. One of our interns did the coding last semester.

Good luck.

paul