Imad,

Ignore the last message about ox.Visible = .t. that doesn't seem to work. I use oWord = createobject( "word.application" ) while automating Word97.

To launch the appropriate app for a registered file extension you use ShellExecute() instead. There are samples for this on my website too.

>Following the same example about launching a word doc from vfp, what if you know the full path and name of the file to open, but don't know that it is a word doc file. In this case, cannot use "createobj('word.basic')" before you can tell what type of file it is.
>
>I tried ox=getobject('c:\myfile.doc') which actually is supposed to know the type of application to launch (as explained in vfp help) but after that I could not reference the object ox to make the file visible. any ideas?