>That reminds me of a question I wanted to ask a long while ago. Do you know whether Word has the capability of showing (not necessarily through Automation) words in the dictionary that match a specific pattern? Let's assume that for a crossword puzzle, I need a match for "?a???b??c", or for the children's homework, we want to search for words that contain a certain combination of letters, simething like "*abc*".

I don't know. I know that you can search for fairly complex patterns (can't remember whether it's all of regular expressions or not), but I don't know about searching the dictionary.

Tamar