Thanks Killian and others for this discussion and for your experience in the matter. It's exactly the kind of info that I thought that I should consider before undertaking changes to improve a program which may instead crap it out. The Word information is not linked to XL. It is a supporting record for XL's stored totals. No real need to link is there? I think that I will stick with my original design with some modifications. I need to add another commodity expense to the same file storage locations so I will use the record extraction routine to seperate the expenses by commodity from the same Word doc. I don't believe that this will produce too many pages or overload my string variable (I'm not sure if I followed the discussion on this point?) I still may invest some effort towards preventing this unknown. Dave