Hi Eric -

Been there, done that.

We've got some fairly complex documents - 30+ charts, 10+ tables in 30
pages - that were built similarly, but we were importing WMF files
instead of pictures from Excel, but if you know both you should also
know that there wasn't much difference.
Under Win95/Office 6, this worked fairly well. Under NT/2k/XP and
Office 97/2k/XP, it was a catastrophe: the 16-bit WMF files from Office
6 were replaced by 32-bit EMF files and our documents became unusable,
especially when updating them.

As far as I am concerned, Word is uncontrollable: you have to really
jump through hoops in order to guarantee that chart 3 will always be,
to a millimeter or so, on the same page in the same place. And when you
updated in a certain sequence, then the chart boxes would disappear
entirely. It's an acknowledged bug.

So we abandoned Word entirely and do it all in Excel. We shrunk the
cell grid to tiny dimensions in order to gain a fair degree of accuracy
in placing elements on a page; we can now place charts exactly where
they should go; we use text boxes (not Word boxes: there's a
significant problem in the display attributes to a Word box that is
controlled by VBA. It defaults to stretch to fit, which means that text
is distorted whenever you add or subtract text. Known VBA problem,
solveable by using Excel and Word Objects within a VB container...), we
control the vertical and the horizontal. There is nothing wrong with
your TV... :-)

We were never able to work out a decent solution using Word and Excel:
hence we only use Excel. Give it a try, you might be surprised how well
it works.

If you'd like a sample of what we did, I'll be happy to send it to you
privately...

John