Question about Ms Word

If you have to program the read itself, it would be complicated. RTF files are much simpler, but I'm not sure how much work would be involved to build a reader. (I did a small hack once to write in RTF format, just a sub-set of the available keys, and it was pretty straightforward. It's very similar to HTML in how it's structured.) Since you want to display the plain text in a text box, you don't necessarily have to recognize and deal with all of the elements in the file, just know enough of the format to skip past unnecessary items and read in the text blocks. That would be my take on it if you had to roll-your-own. Of course, it would be easier to find a library that did the read for you. Happy searching! :-) If Word was on their machine, you probably could use COM to communicate with Word, but it sounds like that isn't an option for you. Gary

Hi, you could use Process.start("Winword.exe") to open MS Word. Also, you'll have to check if word is installed on your users' PC. If not, then you could open a notepad, Process.Start("Notepad.exe") else, open Word Thanks irfan