I have not used OLE with Word, just with PPT. My suggestion is to add some error checking around the open to see if indeed it is succeeding. Also, two additional comments: 1) you can replace the double backslashes with a single forward slash, 2) you can use Data::Dumper to look at the data structures, but set the depth to one-- at least in PPT each item has a link to its parent so any depth other than 1 will cause Data::Dumper to consume all available memory...

HTH, --traveler