>If you have MSDN you can download Office 2003 now... The XML features are very cool and it's quite doable now to create and parse Word documents reasonably easily.
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>However, I still think that if Automation is an option it's an easier choice to write out documents unless you always write out exactly in the same format. The Word XML format still is based on a schema and very complex style rules that are not trivial to duplicate. However, I susppose you could create a template document and then use only those styles...

Microsoft is going to provide various XSLT documents that can be used to map XML to WordML. This will make it easier for developers since they can focus on the Word doc content in an XML file and let the XSLT doc handle the creation of the WordML meta data.