I figured out the last thing - a debugger was running and that was
interfeering with things. Once I shut down everything and just started
what I wanted, no problem. Now the next problem...

I can start a Word document with a table on it and write into the
table. I can bold & unbold, italics & unitalics, and change colors no
problem. The "put a business graph into the buffer and paste it into
the document" took a little longer, but I worked that out. and
modifying the headers was easy. But now "they" want the lists
bulleted. I have no idea how to do bullets from a macro. It is easy
from inside Word, but from a macro? No idea. Suggestions?