>>We may have got a different value of never... That is, this setting worked fine until a certain version of Word, when there appeared a new dialog which wasn't of the same class. You probably never did the thing that would cause that dialog to appear.
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>That is correct, early on we realized that versions could cause problems, so we tried to limit the use to the absolute necessary functionality. But I must say we never really had a lot of problems, except the ones we created ourselves. The biggest issue we had was, that the original developer (back in the 90s) created the code using recorded VBA macros in Word, and with that copied the "Selection" instead of real range objects, and other places he used the clipboard for the obviously generated Copy() Paste() methods when record a VBA macro in Word. That caused timing issues and other strange side effects, but it was just done wrong.

Back in 2005 I did a lot of reporting into generated Excel sheets, with bunch of named ranges, expanding ranges, inserted pictures... lots of that stuff, and I had a routine which would generate a few dozen megabytes of those every evening. Luckily, I lost that job, because most of that would probably stop working once they installed Office 2007...

With even more luck, I didn't have much to do about reporting in the rest of my career :). But for what I had to, it was mostly trouble with Word's wordmerge, and it only got worse with every new version of it.