With much help from UT participants (thanks guys) I have developed an approach to VFP-Word automation which works fine. (I use a one row FoxPro table as a standard data source to the merge document and fill the table with data just before the merge.)

I have Office 97 Professional Edition installed on my computer. In the install sequence there is a place to check Data Access options and I picked dBase/FoxPro tables among others.

But when I went to install the system on my clients comptuter, mail merge would not recognize a DBF table as a data source. I tried reinstalling her standalone Word program and I couldn't find anything about Data Access options. I also tried installing Office 97 Small Business Edition with similar results. Finally I installed my copy of Office 97 Professional which works.

So is there anyway to access a FoxPro table as a mail merge data source without telling the client they have to buy Office 97 Prof. Ed. for every workstation?

Peter Robinson