>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.)
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>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.
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>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.
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>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?
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>Peter Robinson

Peter,
I just got through creating a merge file from VFP6 to Word 97. Used to use Word 6.0. Anyhow, you have to use the copy to ??? type fox2x command, it won't pick up a VFP 5 or 6 file (Probably not 3.0 either.) I didn't like this approach because it still has to go through ODBC in order to be able to utilize it (in Word anyhow.) I don't know for certain what type of word processor my users will have so I changed it to a delimited text file. I think this is much more universal to use. If you decide to use this approach, get back with me, because I used a little trick to this.

Robert