In a previous thread I posted here and to vbscript, I was explaining that I
was trying to use a script to get some functionalities offerred by Word to
work in Excel and vice versa. The instance I was working on was a wildcard
text search in Excel; the only way I could find to make it work was to read
each cell in Excel into a string, open a Word doc and write in the string,
perform the search, then write the answers back into Excel. It worked, but
was very kludgy.

Jonathan West commented in that thread that there are better ways to
cross-utilize functionalities across applications, and keeping everything
within VBA is better than calling an external script and passing variables
back and forth. (I was trying a script to use a RegExp text search. I have
since let that slip down the list of things to work on.)

I have the utmost confidence in Jonathan's wisdom and experience, and would
like to see if we might be able to explore this further. Thinking about it,
there seems to be no reason why I can't instance Word's Find object and use
the built-in wildcard search capabilities from within an Excel macro. I'm
not quite so sure about using Excel's AutoFilter or Data Validation on a
Word table, though, but it would be very nice.

What are the limits and boundaries here in trying to cross-utilize
functionalities like this? Is it worth pursuing?

Ed