Soory I seem to have confused people - what I want to do is read large quantities of letters to the computer and for it to produce me a text file so that the contents of the letters can be shared amongst the family. I know there is a commercial program - Dragon naturally Speaking that does this , it also has a lot of othher bells and whistles that I don't need , so I was hoping there might be a simple shareware version. So I want to "dictate" to my computer and have it give me a text file of some description. Thanks to those who have answered , I'm looking into the later versions of Word to see if they would serve, I am using office 97 which isn't. Anne