I've tried the Office HTML approach, (with Excel not Word), and it works great, but there are a couple of limitations. Once is that unless you learn MSFT's bizarre XML-ish syntax, you can't use many of the features of these applications (then again, maybe that's a good thing :). Second, though this may not apply to your case, it's hard to tell Office what the types of your data are, which can affect things. Third, for especially large documents, it takes Office longer to process HTML than it does its native formats. If none of these apply to your situation (and they may not), then HTML is my suggestion too.

In reply to Re: Re: Re: parse MS Word Template fields for legal documents by Errto
in thread parse MS Word Template fields for legal documents by Anonymous Monk

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