Yes and no. Format depends on fixed width fonts (ie Courier New and friends) to line up the stuff. Here is a table in fixed width font

fixed | width | format
------+-------+-------
foo   | bar   | baz
[download]

And here is the same thing in variable width font (completely naff):

fixed | width | format
------+-------+-------
foo | bar | baz

If you can tolerate that you would just stick the output of format into a scalar and then insert it with a fixed width font type into Word and it will all look fine. format is a legacy item and painful to use. To capture its output you need a filehandle. I would just use sprintf which can do anything format can.

my $tmpfile = 'c:/tmp/tmp.txt';

$str = 'widget';
$cost = 10;

format Something =
Item: @<<<<<<<<@>>>>>
$str,  '$' . sprintf("%.2f",$cost)
.

# format is a pain in the ass and won't write to an IO::Handle so we
# need to go through these contortions
open TMP, "+>$tmpfile" or die $!;
select(TMP);      # need to select our file as the output handle for w
+rite
$~ = 'Something'; # now select our format
write TMP;        # now write it
seek TMP, 0, 0;   # up to the top of the file to read it
select(STDOUT);   # reinstate STDOUT as our ouput handle
@data = <TMP>;    # read in our formatted data
close TMP;        # clean up
unlink $tmpfile;

print @data;      # wohoo
[download]

To 'format' variable width fonts you need tables or perhaps columns at a pinch. Either use Word ones or Excel. Making a formatted table in Excel and then inserting this as an object into Word is much better documented than manipulating tables in Word so will be easier to do.

cheers

tachyon

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