Hi Barabara,

>>If you don't have this, it is definitely a setup problem, as I had to click on these drivers as part of a custom install.<<

Yes, I have done this custom install of Office 97 probably 50 times to give my users access to the FoxPro data drivers. The trouble is that that option in the Custom install is greyed out when I try to run it on my machine and no longer has any impact on the installed verisons of Word and Excel. Several people have suggested that I un-install and re-install Office 97 and although I believe that will restore the Files of Type options in my Word and Excel Open Files dialogs, I also believe that when I go to use those options, I will still receive an error message that the old FoxPro drivers are no longer supported and I need to be using the new Visual FoxPro drivers. This is a problem that numerous FoxPro developers are having. I also don't know what impact that would have on the new data drivers. Office 97 Setup doesn't know anything about vfpodbc.dll, only about odbcjt32.dll.

What I need is a way to get Word and Excel to recognize the new drivers and use them. No one has yet been able to tell how to do that. Although I should be able to get VBA to recognize a DSN in code (barring the problems outlined in Knowledge Base article Q231714), I don't know how to get their user interfaces to recognize them. Based on the info in the article, it might be a moot point until Microsoft gets the new drivers working properly.

Someday I hope MS will settle on a data sharing protocol that a developer can get debugged before it changes.<sg>