It should have be done in a scripting language (like, say, LISTDB MEMO) from which you can generate all the formats you want from plain text to fancy printout. However, secretaries and technical writers tend to have no idea how one would use SCRIPT or equivalent. Several years ago we decided that we needed a standard format for documentation work so that we didn't end up with a big mess with everyone using a different program and only knowing this particular program, and we chose Word for the obvious reasons. It is EXTREMELY DIFFICULT to get decent ASCII output out of Word, to the point that I spent several days writing a program to do this the second time I had to convert a large Word document to plain text. The program is a kludge based on my typographic conventions but it took less time to write it than it would have taken to do it manually. Eric