Hi Michael,
Sorry for the delay in replying. After posting this, i went off and attempted to get this to working via a .NEt webservice which accepts the values from flex and then generates the word document by placing the data in bookmarked fields. This works fine if the webservice is running on my localmachine, but the minute i put the webservice on the server, it fails. I just end up with an instance of word running on the server and no document visible on the client. Having read around the subject a bit more i have found that MS advise against server-side automation of office applications.
So this brings me to back to where I started and to this thread. If i go down the xml route (which is quite unknown territory to me as I am not overly familiar with this), will i still encounter serverside issues? Will I have to look for the document on the client machine and can i still open it, pre-populated with the data from the flex application, from Flex using the methods you have talked about?
hope you can help
cheers