Thanks to Wyss Clemens and Jonathan Conway for their suggestions ! Now, WIN32OLE will solve the access-to-com part of the equation, but what of building COM obejcts with Ruby ? I should point out that so far I have only been a "consumer" to COM, and I am not familiar with the innards. Someone pointed out that it may not be possible to do COM objects with Ruby because of its interpretive nature. I think it is possible because I have done COMs with Visual Foxpro which is also interpreted. FRF