>3) I have studied the vb help on the word objects/methods. (I know about Della Martin's book - but it doesn't look like I could get it on short notice - unless you know of a magical way) But many things are not obvious in the docs. Any many things don't work as I expect them to.

You can purchase the book on-line from the publisher - www.hentzenwerke.com; once purchased, you can download the entire book in an e-book format (it's actually a compiled .CHM, so no special e-book reader is needed) and it's the full content - if you don't need the paper copy, you can save a bit by just purchasing the e-book format.

>1) Since vfp does not accept named parameters, it appears that you need to list all the parameters for every method you call, as placeholders.

That's correct; VFP requires that you specify the parameters in order, with placeholders of the appropriate type in the command line for omitted parameters.


>2) It is not obvious from the documentation what the defaults are for each method,and what will happen if you just call the method, without any parameters (e.g. odoc.close - appears to close and save by default ??/)

Get the Office Automation Help documentation - it's included with the Developer's Edition of Office, and in the MSDN docs.


>5) Are there other more efficient ways to do what I am trying to accomplish?
>

Manipulation outside of Word using something like the WSH's VBScript.RegExp object to perform the find/replace would seem sensible.