>For the imbedded line feeds, I'm not sure I want to replace them with something else, as one result set is used to populate a grid in the application as well as the report sent to Word, and I have a lot of reports. If I have to, however, I could adjust to that.

I figure the CRs in memos would mess up Word's TextToTable routine, and that's why I'd rather hide them while that happens.

>My bigger problem comes with Word. I'm finding that when I try to run a search & replace, Word won't do it properly unless I make the application object visible. I've tried selecting the range top-down, bottom-up, and in several variations, as well as variations on executing the replace. No luck. The only thing I haven't done yet is try the replace after populating the table. I'm using VFP 6 and need to be compatible back to Word version 8. In fact, I'm finding there are a number of quirky things that happen (more precisely don't happen) when the Word app is not yet visible. Any thoughts on that one?

If everything else fails, then make it visible, but disable screen updates while you work with it. There's a VBA equivalent of .LockScreen, though I have forgotten the syntax... something like ScreenUpdates or so. It's been a while, when 300MHz was big, and I remember I wrote some macros to convert codepages - freezing the screen did miracles to speed.