the reason I was using getobject() first was I was getting an error message if word was already open and I tried to use createobject(). basically, I do the following

oword=getobject(,"word.application")
if type("oword") # "O" or type("oword.name") # C
oword = createobject("word.application")
endif

I will check out the other posts about not using getobject()