>Can anybody describe me the pros and/or cons of creating an ms word object using...
>oWordObj = CREATEOBJECT('Word.Application')
>vs
>oWORDbasic =CREATEOBJECT('word.basic')
>I have discovered some differences such opening a document...
>oWordObj.Documents.Open('C:\WINDOWS\TEMP\MailingO.rtf')
>vs.
>oWORDbasic.fileOpen('C:\WINDOWS\TEMP\MailingO.rtf')
>
>Is there a preferred choice? Is one based on MS Basic and the other a DDE leftover? (realizing DDE is still active in word 97)

Office97 and later use VB for Appications as their scripting language. Earlier version used WordBasic. When you create a word object using Word.Application, that object uses VBA commands and objects. When you use Word.Basic, you are committed to WordBasic. The only reason you can still instanciate a Word.Basic object is for backwards compatibility- the VBA method is much preferred, mostly because that's the new way, but there are also other things you can do with VBA that you can't with WordBasic (please don't ask me what).

BTW, you can execute WordBasic commands in a VBA object by using it's WordBasic object. So you can still

oWord = CREATEOBJECT("Word.Application")

oWord.WordBasic.FileOpen('C:\WINDOWS\TEMP\MailingO.rtf')

and use VBA syntax right along side it.

HTH