>I downloaded the file you suggested and looked at the doc file. I could not find the answer to my question.
>
>Do I need to explicitly close the word automation in my program after the user closes word and if so how do I know when to close it?
>

In order to detect when Word was closed, you need to use Eventhandler. It should be covered in this article.

You may have a form's property for your word object, once you know it was closed by the user, you may set it to NULL.

If you close your form and the Word was not yet closed by the user, you may close it using Close(0) method and also you would need to set form's object reference to NULL.