>I'm pretty sure I need to access an .olb type library for Word or Excel if I intend to use some of the constants defined by those apps for use in methods calls defined in their classes.

You can find the VFP header file for Word here. We don't seem to have a similar header for Excel. I believe I've previously used the OLE/COM viewer that comes with VS to extract a C-style header file from a typelib. Unfortunatly, I don't have it loaded on this machine at the present and can't confirm. Poke around a bit, and you may find it.