Thanks for your suggestions. They would of course work fine, but I'm sure there's a better way. Could we not modify getUserFieldElement to also provide an element or path that works with insertParagraph, insertTable, removeParagraph, etc? Alternately, could it not return an array of paths for each occurrence of the user field value?

With user fields it would be easy for our staff to write document templates without having to learn what is in essence another markup language added on top of what is probably a perfectly adequate feature set built into OpenOffice.org.

Cheers, Paul