[cayce]

I need to preface this posting that I am not a programmer with a
philosophical question. I feel I need to get some training so I will be
equipped to "get under the hood" of Word. My goal is to develop some
automation for coworker's Word documents to save them time. By this I am
anticipating they could build a document cafeteria style, picking and
choosing from content that is already in chunks, grabbing from some sort of
repository (currently nonexistent) of content and graphics. This sounds like
the perfect application for a wizard created from a user form and VBA would
be the wizard tool I believe.

However, I am also considering XML training since it is the basis for the
new MS Office 2007 suite. Further, XML can be used for structuring content
that is self describing and independent of presentation. This also opens up
ease of content reuse that let's you out of "format jail." While my workplace
isn't big enough to warrant and afford a full blown content management
system, I keep wondering if XML for content might be a better way of building
repository.

So, since I need to choose one type of training, VBA vs XML, does anyone
have insights into which might give me the most options moving forward,
accomplishing a way to build a content repository and adding automation to
the building of Word documents?