>John,
>
>>Looks like you found a solution, but here is this if you are interested at all. This is pretty basic.
>
>We all decided we like your solution more than the hyperlink idea...THANKS!!!

Jim,

I thought that you were interested in retrieving an object reference to Word rather than simply starting it with the document loaded.

While ShellExecute does provide this functionality, I'd be more inclined to use the Windows Script Host's Shell object's Run method to do this. First, there's less code to deal with. Second, unlike ShellExecute, it can be used to make the calling program wait until the called program terminates before continuing execution.