Hilmar, again thank you for pointing me in the direction of your Excel article. That gave me most of the details I need. I do have one question left that I can't seem to find the answer to:

I need to be able to call Word and then open a document. My problem is that the name of the document is stored in a variable. When ever I try to pass the variable to Word in the oleapp.Documents.Open(...) command it gives me an error saying that Open is not a 'by reference' property. Am I to assume that you cannot use macro substitution to pass the file name to Word?

Any and all help, greatly appreciated!

Dick Day