thanks Andrew, very much, for trying to help me, i am still stuck. sorry for the delayed reply but i was giving up on the possibility of someone helping me. the word document had merged cell in the tables but Graham's code helped me get rid of them. so i'm not sure what else it could be. Thanks for the tip. I will try again and see how it turns out. Thanks

Andrew and Graham,

Thanks for helping me get this project up an running. I'm not sure what I was doing wrong but I kept working on the Entire.Column Insert suggestion and somehow it started working. Maybe I had my quotes or parentheses in the wrong place but now I am up and running, so to speak. Thanks Graham for all your work in getting the code for switching between Word and Excel. I've been reading about binding, and I don't understand how your code works but I will eventual. Thanks again for your help