I'm mostly self-taught, since retiring, and mostly while developing solutions for people with challenges like yours!

A book you might find useful (I did much of the technical review) is The Secret Life of Word: A Professional Writer's Guide to Microsoft Word Automation, by R Delwood, and published by XML Press (http://xmlpress.net/publications/word-secrets/). This isn't a programming book as such (though it does have some programming in it) and doesn't profess to teach you how to program. Rather, it shows how to combine Word's various tools to achieve whatever the desired result might be. Another that I contributed to (and has much more programming in it) is Word Hacks, by A Savikas and published by O'Reily Media (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596004934.do). Although that one pre-dates Office 2007, much of the content is still relevant.

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]