Thank you for your reply. Yes, the steps you describe were _exactly_ what I did to solve the problem myself. I turned on the pilcrow marks in the word document, wrote single lines of VBA code, stepped through them, noted where the insertion point was, and traced how the selection moved around and collapsed as I went through things.

The good news is that anyone who ever reads this thread in the future will sure have a good explanation of how things work! :-) Best regards, Kevin